TEXT: By Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
  Based on the ‘Laundry Files’ novels by Charles Stross
  
  1
  Based on the Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross.
  The Laundry Files © 2001-2010 Charles Stross, used under license by Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
  All rights reserved.
  The Laundry RPG © 2010 Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
  GOD GAME BLACK © 2013 Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
  The Basic Roleplaying System © Chaosium Inc, used under license by Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd.
  Published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd, Riverside House, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
  www.cubicle7.co.uk
  Printed in the USA
  Credits
  Writing: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
  Editing: Matthew Pook
  Layout and Graphic Design: Paul Bourne
  Art Direction: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jon Hodgson
  Cover Art: Malcolm McClinton
  Interior Art: Jon Hodgson, Pat Loboyko, Rich Longmore, Pat MacEvoy, Sam Manley, Scott Neil, 
  Scott Purdy, Graeme Neil Reid, Mattias Snygg
  Proofreader: Matthew Pook
  Line Manager: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
  Creative Director: Dominic McDowall-Thomas
  1
  GOD GAME BLACK
  Laundry
  GOD_GAME_BLACK
  The
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  2
  Chapter One: Introduction 
  3
  Chapter Two: External Assets 
  4
  Handling Assets 
  6
  What External Assets Do 
  8
  Playing an External Assets Campaign 
  10
  Chapter Three: Updated Personnel 
  14
  Robert  Howard 
  14
  Agent CANDID 
  15
  Gideon Lockhart 
  16
  Persephone Hazard 
  17
  Johnny Prince 
  18
  Nikolai Panin 
  19
  Chapter Four: The Other Place 
  20
  Working Magic 
  20
  Casting a Spell 
  22
  Chapter Five: The Plateau of the Sleeper 
  29
  CODICIL BLACK SKULL 
  29
  The Plateau 
  29
  Operations on the Plateau 
  31
  The Pyramid 
  31
  The Wall of Pain 
  32
  The Temple of the Sleeper 
  33
  Previous Expeditions & Contacts 
  34
  Squadron 666 
  37
  The Plateau of the Sleeper 
  39
  Endgames 
  39
  Chapter Six: Monsters 
  45
  Cymothea Exilis 
  45
  Tough Zombies 
  47
  Dead Kings 
  48
  Chapter Seven: The Black Chamber 
  49
  History of the Black Chamber 
  49
  Structure of the Operational Phenomenology Agency 
  53
  Working for the Black Chamber 
  60
  The Dark Mark & Other Bindings 
  63
  Chamber Assets 
  69
  Gadgets 
  71
  Chamber Games 
  75
  Chapter Eight: Before the Laundry 
  77
  Creating Characters 
  78
  Personalities of the Interbellum 
  80
  Chapter Nine: The Phoney War 
  82
  Chapter Ten: Think of  the Children 
  86
  1. The Break-In 
  87
  2. Mission Briefing 
  89
  3. Jesus was in Griffindor 
  91
  4. Covert Ops 
  95
  5. Zoë 
  97
  6. Cult Responses 
  100
  Handouts 
  103
  Chapter Eleven: The Moral high Ground 106
  1. A Distant Trumpet 
  108
  2. The Saved and the Lost 
  110
  3. Flyover Country 
  111
  4. Through the Gate 
  113
  5. Across the Dead Plateau 
  114
  6. The Lamaserie 
  117
  7. Into the Catacombs 
  118
  8. Riding the Dmu Thag 
  120
  Handouts 
  122
  Index 
  124
  CONTENTS
  2
  
  3
  The Laundryverse isn’t a static setting. It’s not eternal September, forever approaching but never quite reaching CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN in an asymptotic apocalypse. Each novel in the series moves the Stars closer to Rightness. 
  The core rulebook of the Laundry Files roleplaying game covers events up to The Fuller Memorandum. It describes the 
  Laundry as it seems to new recruits – an eccentric entrenched bureaucracy that manages to succeed despite itself. It’s 
  underfunded, overstaffed, hide-bound and occasionally deranged. It’s the Peter Principle mixed with Lovecraftian horror.
  There’s another side to the Laundry, as revealed in The Apocalypse Codex novel – an older, more competent, more powerful 
  cabal hidden inside the shell of bureaucracy. GOD GAME BLACK provides updates and options for your Laundry 
  campaign. Think of it as the DVD extras for the novel, or the patch notes for a software update. Or the ticking of a clock, 
  counting down towards Apocalypse.
  Chapter Two: External Assets describes how the Laundry deals with employees who don’t fit comfortably into 
  the standard org chart.
  Chapter Three: Updated Personnel has write-ups of Bob, Mo, Persephone Hazard and other characters, and 
  shows how a Laundry character develops over the years (if they survive).
  Chapter Four: The Other Place discusses magic in all its forms, emphasising the look-and-feel of sorcery.
  Chapter Five: The Plateau of the Sleeper contains a Laundry briefing document on CODICIL BLACK SKULL 
  and the Pyramid of the Sleeper. It also discusses operations on the plateau, and how to use the Pyramid or a similar 
  Mythos entity as the trigger for a phase change in your campaigns.
  Chapter Six: Monsters has statistics for new creatures, such as the Tongue-Eaters and the Dead Kings of Tibet.
  Chapter Seven: The Black Chamber has an extensive write-up of the world’s biggest and most mysterious occult 
  intelligence agency, including rules for creating agents of the OPA and playing campaigns based around the 
  Chamber.
  Chapter Eight: Before the Laundry delves into the history of the organisation before the Dee-Turing theorem 
  and the modern emphasis on computational demonology.
  Chapter Nine: The Phoney War describes the period after the Sleeper stirs in the Pyramid, the ramp-up to 
  apocalypse.
  Chapters Ten and Eleven present adventures for your Laundry Files game. In Think of  the Children, the player 
  characters must infiltrate a mysterious private school, while The Moral High Ground sends the characters to the 
  Plateau of the Sleeper to stop Schiller’s last-ditch plan for revenge.
  Introduction
  INTRODUCTION
  3
  Introduction
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  4
  In a time of recession, when jobs are being slashed across the 
  public sector, the Laundry’s recruitment practices continue 
  to be... shall we say, voracious? Here’s how to get a job in the 
  Laundry.
  Step 1. See something you shouldn’t have. A BLUE HADES 
  crawling out of the ocean. A really weird fractal. A copy of 
  the Necronomicon (the real one). The true face of the dead 
  thing that puts on its ill-fitting mask of skin every day before 
  appearing on national television. 
  Step 2. See enough of it that the Plumbers cannot easily wipe 
  your memory with a forgetfulness geas.
  Step 3. Prove that you have ‘skills, training, talents or 
  other assets that would in some form be useful to internal 
  operations while still being actively detrimental to ongoing 
  activities.’ In other words, if the Laundry can find a place for 
  you anywhere at all, they have to take you. Oh, you might be 
  assigned to a shed in the Pennines where you’ll spend the rest 
  of your life shoveling shoggoth dung, or used as a flesh suit 
  when certain bodiless entities come visiting, or worse, put on 
  the Helpdesk, but they’ll find a job for you. And it’ll be a job 
  for life. With pension rights.
  The Laundry is hugely overstaffed, horribly underfunded and 
  aggressively insular. As far as most people know, the Laundry 
  doesn’t have External Assets and they certainly don’t show up 
  on any commonly available organisation chart.
  And that’s by design.
  There’s a loophole up in Step Three. You can have ‘skills, 
  training, talents or other assets that would in some form be useful 
  to internal operations’ while still being ‘not actively detrimental to 
  ongoing activities’. 
  Take the delightful BASHFUL INCENDIARY, aka 
  Persephone Hazard. 
  Is she ‘useful to internal operations’? Yes, most definitely. 
  Does she play well with others? No, she does not. 
  She belongs both inside and out the Laundry… in External 
  Assets.
  Why External Assets?
  “The Laundry, Mr. Howard. It’s not noted 
  for enabling high achievers, is it? It is a 
  government agency. And government agencies 
  are run as bureaucracies. There is a role 
  for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for 
  certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates 
  standardisation 
  and 
  interchangeability. 
  Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks 
  that must be done consistently whether 
  the people assigned to them are brilliant 
  performers or bumbling fools. You can’t 
  always count on having Albert Einstein 
  in the patent office, so you design its 
  procedures to work even if you hire Mr. 
  Bean by mistake. Wizards and visionaries 
  are all very good, but you cannot count on 
  them for leg-work and form-filling. Which is 
  why there is tail-chasing and make-work and 
  so many committee meetings and reports to 
  read and checklists to fill out, to keep the 
  low achievers preoccupied.”
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  The Laundry excels at stability. Procedures 
  for every eventuality, forms for every 
  imaginable 
  situation, 
  and 
  everything 
  minuted, recorded, time-stamped and archived 
  for posterity. The bureaucracy grinds out 
  any spark of individual initiative – and 
  that’s by design. Anyone can be pulled off 
  the street and put to work in the Laundry, 
  so most of the work can be done by anyone. 
  That bureaucracy serves a purpose. External 
  Assets fulfills another – it’s a place for 
  those with unique talents, who don’t fit into 
  neat boxes, and who aren’t standardised, 
  interchangeable parts.
  External Assets
  4
  External contractors? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Not here, not in an agency that promiscuously 
  hires anyone and everyone who stumbles across the truth—makes them a job offer they can’t refuse, 
  inducts them under the authority of an appallingly strong geas, and keeps them busy chasing paper 
  until it’s time to retire. But we don’t employ external contractors! Do we?
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  
  5
  Status of  External Assets
  External Assets don’t show up on the Laundry’s organisation 
  chart. They don’t carry warrant cards, they don’t go to 
  meetings, and they don’t visit the office under most 
  circumstances. (If they did, they’d get eaten – no warrant card 
  means the guardians treat them as intruding snack food). 
  They have, however, sworn the very same oath of office 
  as every other employee.1 Their souls are bound to serve 
  Her Majesty’s Government and to safeguard the United 
  Kingdom against the forces of… well, darkness doesn’t 
  cover it. The forces of screaming abyssal horror that cannot 
  be encapsulated in frail words, maybe. Some Assets have 
  additional checks on their behaviour, too. 
  Non-human assets may be geased or otherwise restrained 
  in their feeding practises. Others have magical watchers 
  placed on them, like Ramona Random’s succubus. (The 
  Laundry tends not to use lethal entities like that, but the 
  attentions of even a non-lethal watcher can be exceedingly 
  unpleasant). 
  External Assets aren’t on the payroll, either. They get 
  funding from the Laundry, but on a mission-by-mission 
  basis. Between missions, Assets are either expected to fend 
  for themselves, or are paid a stipend from a black budget… 
  or they slumber dreamlessly in certain hidden vaults or lairs. 
  Between missions, External Assets are free to do whatever 
  they wish – within the bounds agreed-upon by the Laundry. 
  Some have fairly ordinary human lives. Some, like Hazard, 
  have extraordinary human lives. Assets are permitted to run 
  businesses, travel, train, relax, or do as they please as long as 
  they are ready for duty when called upon. 
  That call can come at any time, and the Asset can be sent 
  anywhere in the world (or beyond) and be called upon 
  to face horrors beyond imagining. Assets are generously 
  rewarded when they succeed, but they earn every penny. 
  And when an Asset dies, there is no acknowledgement. No 
  pension, no benefits, no funeral, not even the clandestine 
  sealed-record honours sometimes awarded to a deceased 
  member of the Laundry. Just the closing of a manila folder 
  in an office in Whitehall. 
  Monitoring External Assets
  The Laundry monitors its External Assets. In fact, those 
  doing the monitoring normally don’t know that the sinister 
  occultists being monitored are secretly on the books. A 
  team of low-level field officers might be assigned to keep 
  an eye on some fearsome warlock who leads a cult of 
  frothing Cthulhu-worshippers, and they never suspect that 
  the warlock also works for the Laundry. The Oath of Office 
  and other safety precautions ensure that External Assets 
  rarely go rogue, but it’s not impossible. 
  It’s also not unheard-of for the Laundry to decide that 
  a particular Asset is no longer required. Some Assets are 
  brought into the Laundry on a formal basis – a fate worse 
  than death if you’re allergic to bureaucracy. Others are 
  imprisoned or have their accounts permanently closed. 
  Assets are in a precarious position compared to a regular 
  employee. Most Assets, therefore, try to stay a few steps 
  ahead of their monitors. It’s better for them if the Laundry 
  doesn’t know about their secret Swiss bank accounts, or 
  their planned escape routes, or their associations with 
  certain renegade sorcerers who specialise in cracking 
  geases. 
  ExTERNAL ASSETS
  5
  External Assets
  1: Or a variation – Assets are permitted a lot more flexibility. Not all Assets know that they’re contracted to the Laundry. Some believe that they’re 
  working for some other OCCINTEL group, or for a private contractor, or something stranger. False God operations are quite common in this 
  shadowy realm.
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  6
  Categories of  External Asset
  “It is possible that from time to time outside interlopers who, I 
  emphasize, do not work for the Laundry, and who feature nowhere 
  in our org chart, might take an interest in people associated with 
  Number Ten. Wild cards, loose cannons.”
  The Apocalypse Codex
  External Assets don’t fall into neat categories. That’s pretty 
  much why they’re kept as External Assets – they don’t 
  fit into nice neat boxes on an org chart. Still, they can be 
  roughly divided into five overlapping types. 
  •	
  Wild Cards: Individuals with all the right skills to be 
  useful, but who can’t – for one reason or another – 
  be employed in a bureaucracy like the Laundry. A lot 
  of Wild Cards are former (or current) criminals. The 
  Laundry’s also got a few ex-mercenaries and former 
  cult assassins on the roster. Wild Cards tend to be very 
  good at doing nasty wet-work or breaking and entering. 
  •	
  Talents: Sorcerers, psychics and the like. Most 
  Computational Demonologists can be crammed into 
  the Laundry’s org chart – they like order and structure 
  and planning things, even if they chafe under the 
  strictures of bureaucracy. Traditional sorcerers tend to 
  be even weirder and less accepting of rules, hence they 
  tend to end up in External Assets.
  •	
  Non-Humans: The Laundry has a few non-humans 
  on the books officially, but most fall under the aegis 
  of External Assets. If Ramona had not defected so 
  publicly from the Black Chamber and needed the 
  Laundry’s direct protection, she might have ended up 
  as an External Asset. Some of those entities on the 
  External Assets list actually predate the Laundry – 
  they’ve been around for a long time, living amongst us. 
  The Laundry allows them to continue to masquerade 
  as humans, on the condition that they make themselves 
  available when needed. Other Assets in this category 
  include former humans who’ve been warped or 
  changed by occult encounters. 
  •	
  External Agents: Breaking your Oath of Office isn’t 
  a very wise thing to do. Even if you’ve got the magical 
  protection needed to survive the ordeal, it’ll leave you 
  scarred, damaged and burnt – in every meaning of the 
  word. Those who flee one OCCINTEL group need 
  the protection of another to survive. Sometimes, the 
  Laundry takes defectors in officially (Ramona again), 
  but other ex-spies must be kept at arms’ length. 
  This category of Asset covers ex-agents from other 
  espionage organisations who work with the Laundry 
  without being officially acknowledged. There are even 
  some former Laundry officers who broke their oaths, 
  but are still used as Assets from time to time.
  •	
  Sideways Promotions: Finally, External Assets is also 
  a place to put Laundry officers who have proven track 
  records, but who no longer fit within the organisation 
  proper. Loose cannons, troublemakers, people who 
  aren’t team players – they get kicked out of the official 
  org chart and pushed over into External Assets. This 
  sort of sideways movement only happens rarely, but 
  the Laundry prefers to avoid waste. They’ll always find 
  a place for you, even if it’s as a zombie. 
  Handling Assets
  Every Asset or team of Assets has a controller assigned 
  to them. This controller (or, in Bob’s case, this controller’s 
  slightly clueless assistant) acts as the Asset’s point of contact 
  with the Laundry. The controller passes on the mission, 
  tells the Assets what’s needed,2 doles out the cash, and 
  then stands well back. The relationship between Asset and 
  controller is like that between an informant and a handler, 
  or a length of blue touch-paper and a lit match. 
  A good controller gains the Assets’ trust and confidence 
  while also making it clear that they won’t interfere with how 
  they complete their mission. The controller is also responsible 
  for reporting back to the Laundry, which often requires 
  a mental balancing act over a tank of metaphorical sharks. 
  On the one hand, the whole point of using an external, 
  deniable Asset is so that the Laundry can deny all 
  involvement. On the other, the Laundry wants to know 
  everything that its Assets – and its money – are up to. 
  Controllers have to balance what the Laundry wants to 
  know with what the Laundry needs to know. That swings 
  both ways – even more than regular officers, Assets must 
  only be told what they need to know. A good controller is, 
  in effect, an information sphincter that reacts quickly and 
  shuts very tightly indeed. 
  The controller also has to have leverage over the Asset. 
  There’s the Oath of Office, of course, but relying on magical 
  compulsions for everything isn’t the best idea.3 Money 
  works, for a lot of contractors. Others are blackmailed 
  or threatened into helping the Laundry (“Work for us, or 
  we’ll tell the Thirteenth Directorate where to you find you.”), 
  or the Laundry provides some support that isn’t available 
  elsewhere (like removing geases placed on an Asset by other 
  OCCINTEL groups). A surprising number of contractor 
  6
  2. Note: That’s “what’s needed,” not “what is to be done.” The Laundry doesn’t tell Assets how to do their jobs. In fact, most of the time the Laundry 
  explicitly doesn’t want to know how they get things done. Plausible deniability, blessed be thy name. 
  3. For one thing, layering on geases tends to have deleterious effects on the subject’s sanity. Too many geases sap creativity and independent thought, and 
  conflicting geases means psychotic breaks and/or spontaneous combustion. Geases are a brute-force solution relied on by amateurs.
  
  7
  work for the Laundry because they know that when the 
  Stars Come Right, the Laundry is one of the few groups on 
  this planet that have a snowball’s chance of surviving, and 
  they want to be on the winning team (or, at least, the Not 
  Immediately Losing Horribly team). 
  Others work for the Laundry because they’ve got bizarre 
  sublimated death wishes, and interpret “fighting cultists and 
  monsters” as “fun.” 
  Controllers have to be able to walk the line between the 
  Laundry’s regimented bureaucracy and the unpredictable, 
  dangerous shadow realm of the unplanned black operation. 
  They need to be respected in both spheres, and that is a rare 
  combination of skills. Most Assets consider line Laundry 
  staff to be incompetent button-pushers who would crack or 
  fold under pressure; few people have the talent and bravery 
  to impress an Asset while also being compliant or smooth 
  enough to navigate the Laundry’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. 
  Matching Assets
  Some Assets work as teams, like BASHFUL INCENDIARY 
  and Johnny McTavish. Others work alone, or are formed into 
  ad hoc teams by the Laundry for a particular mission. The 
  Laundry keeps careful track of the talents and specialities 
  of its External Assets and deploys them as needed. So, 
  if a mission profile calls for a trio of merry ex-Special-
  Forces shitkickers, a computer hacker, someone who can 
  walk through walls and an Anointed Daughter of Yig, the 
  Laundry can look through its roster of External Assets and 
  assemble a group that matches those requirements. 
  External Assets are professionals who know not to ask 
  too many questions. You get the call and show up at the 
  anonymous warehouse to meet five other professionals. You 
  don’t know them except by codename, 
  you do what the Liaison tells you to do, 
  and you walk away when the job’s done 
  without looking back. On rare occasions, 
  the best match for a mission involves 
  staff from both inside and outside of 
  the Laundry. External Assets can issue 
  temporary warrant cards if it needs to 
  bring outsiders inside the org chart for a 
  few weeks, or they can brief the Laundry 
  Officers on the existence and nature 
  of External Assets if they’ve got the 
  clearance to handle it. 
  Budgeting
  The Department of Externalities has 
  a pretty staggering budget in terms of 
  cash on hand, but what really fries the 
  brains of those newly transferred to the 
  department is how little oversight there is on using this cash. 
  Elsewhere in the Laundry, you’ve got to fill out a dozen 
  forms and get the approval of six different managers just to 
  buy a replacement pen for the one you emptied filling out 
  another dozen forms for your last biro. In External Assets, 
  they hand you suitcases full of unmarked non-sequential 
  bills – or would you prefer it in gold? 
  In fact, there’s plenty of oversight, but it stops at the 
  controller. Once the money’s handed over to the External 
  Asset, it’s out of the Laundry’s control. Common practice 
  dictates that a portion of a mission budget gets spent on 
  necessary equipment and preparations while the rest gets 
  spent on expenses and payments to the contractors. As long 
  as the contractor delivers, the Laundry turns a blind eye to 
  how the cash gets spent, and any reasonable expenses are 
  paid without question. 
  External Assets aren’t salaried employees. They only get paid 
  after a mission. The Laundry prefers to keep them hungry.
  Liaison
  Laundry regulations state that a Liaison Officer (who may 
  or may not be the controller for that Asset, but must have 
  that controller’s written approval) must monitor, supervise, 
  oversee and/or accompany an Asset or Asset Team when 
  on a mission. In practise, this can mean anything from:
  • 
  The Liaison Officer hands the Assets a mission and a 
  bag of guns, then takes the battery out of his phone 
  and sits on his hands for 48 hours.
  To
  • 
  The Liaison Officer tags along with the Assets, voicing 
  the Laundry’s official concerns and supplying strategic 
  advice and support.
  7
  ExTERNAL ASSETS
  External Assets
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  8
  Usually, the Liaison Officer checks in on the Assets every 
  day or two via some form of secure communications, 
  such as secure phone calls, oneiromantic visions, or 
  destiny entanglement. The relationship between a Liaison 
  Officer and an Asset is usually much more fraught than 
  that between a controller and an Asset. The controller can 
  keep out of the Asset’s way; a Liaison Officer may not 
  have that luxury. 
  The Liaison Officer reports to the controller. Any concerns 
  or doubts that the Liaison Officer has about the Asset must 
  go through the controller. This arrangement ensures that a 
  controller can protect his Assets from inexperienced junior 
  officers who don’t understand that sometimes you have to 
  follow procedure, sometimes you have to ignore procedure 
  and sometimes you’ve got to pull the pin out of a grenade 
  and hurl yourself backwards out the window of a 16th floor 
  hotel room and then summon a byakhee on the way down 
  in the full view of a hundred witnesses. 
  What External Assets Do
  External Assets do what the Laundry’s regular officers can’t 
  – or shouldn’t. Think of them as super-spies or an occult 
  Dirty Dozen…
   
  Consultation
  Or as consultants. External Assets are always very, very good 
  at whatever they do. They’re not only specialists; they’re 
  so talented that the Laundry bends over to keep them. 
  External Assets are tapped as sources of information or 
  training for conventional Laundry officers. Obviously, the 
  Laundry officers involved are not always informed of the 
  Asset’s status.
  The Laundry tries to avoid mixing External Assets and 
  regular line staff. It tends to cause problems.
  Standard Missions
  A lot of External Asset missions are the same sort of 
  field op undertaken by regular Laundry staff. Investigate 
  that sinister corporation. Find out who tried to open a 
  Gate in Wolverhampton. Exorcise that haunting. Catch ye 
  shoggothe. That sort of thing. The only difference is cost 
  – External Assets cost more to hire, but are expected to 
  provide their own equipment. 
  In general, the Department of  Externalities tries to block 
  any attempts to foist regular operations onto External 
  Assets. These Assets are too valuable to be wasted on 
  tasks that could be accomplished by a card-carrying 
  officer, but sometimes the pallid hand of  Financial 
  Control reaches out and forces Externalities to comply 
  and help placate the dread god who awaits at the end of 
  the financial quarter.
  Illegal Missions
  The real meat of External Asset missions, though, are the 
  ones the Laundry cannot legally undertake. Persephone 
  Hazard, for example, was hired to spy on a religious group 
  that had direct contact with the Prime Minister. For the 
  Laundry to have investigated the Golden Promise Ministry 
  directly would have broken the ban on spying on Downing 
  Street. Therefore, it used External Assets to do so.
  Illegal missions skirt the letter of the law, but usually try 
  to observe its spirit. Using External Assets in the Golden 
  Promise case also protected the Laundry. Imagine if the 
  8
  Rogue Assets
  For an External Asset to do his job and accomplish 
  what a regular officer could not, he has to be 
  given leeway to move. He has to be trusted, even 
  when he acts strangely, or drops out of contact, 
  or suddenly flies to Singapore. The whole point 
  of an External Asset is that he can do the 
  things that the Laundry cannot do directly.
  That means, though, that it’s very hard to tell 
  the difference between an External Asset that’s 
  gone silent and deep, and one that’s gone rogue. 
  That leeway, that freedom of action means that 
  an Asset could go undercover to infiltrate a 
  doomsday cult, but it also means he could have 
  genuinely switched sides and gone cultist. When 
  a questionable situation like that arises, it’s 
  up to the controller and the Liaison Officer to 
  decide what action to take. Do they keep faith 
  with the Asset, and assume that what looks 
  like rogue behaviour is actually a necessary 
  deception? Or do they decide to terminate the 
  operation… and the Asset?
  It’s not commonly discussed, but every Asset on 
  the books in Externalities has an associated 
  Kill Protocol. The nature of this protocol 
  varies depending on the asset. It might be a 
  piece of information that discredits the Asset 
  and ruins them for any other OCCINTEL group. 
  It might be a lethal clause in a geas, or a 
  sympathetic-magic link that can be used as the 
  channel for a death spell (“We’ve got your 
  heart in a jar, and if you cross us, we’ll 
  crush it.”). For other Assets, it may be a 
  literal Kill Protocol – the Laundry knows how 
  to destroy the Asset, and will dispatch a team 
  to do so when necessary. 
  
  9
  Golden Promise Ministry turned out to be a perfectly 
  innocent bunch of clueless Jesus freaks, but in the course 
  of that investigation, the Laundry discovered that the Prime 
  Minister liked to play “sex up the dossier” with a young 
  male secretary. That could lead to an absolutely unforgivable 
  breach of trust between the intelligence services and the 
  government, and could bring down the whole Laundry 
  along with the Prime Minister of the day. 
  ‘Illegal’ doesn’t mean ‘anything goes’ – it just means that 
  certain inconvenient laws get circumvented. Assets are still 
  expected to behave with decorum. Murder, theft, breaking 
  and entering and so forth, are still usually verboten. (That 
  said – if the Laundry were to require the death of a foreign 
  national, or God forbid a British subject, then an External 
  Asset would doubtless be used.)
  External Assets are especially useful when dealing with 
  situations overseas. While the Laundry can get officers into 
  North Korea, or Antarctica, or Tibet, or Washington, the 
  risk of a diplomatic incident means it often makes more 
  sense to send someone who isn’t an official agent of the 
  British Government. The Laundry can hardly be held 
  responsible for the actions of a few tourists, after all.
  Deniable Missions
  Deniable usually goes hand-in-latex-glove with illegal. 
  Every professional spy knows that the day may come when 
  the cock crows three times and their superiors deny all 
  knowledge of them. “If  you get caught”, they say, “we’ll deny 
  all knowledge.”
  That sort of plausible denial is harder to pull off in the 
  shadowy realm of the occult, where loyalty geases and 
  Oaths of Office hold real power. The Laundry cannot just 
  deny all knowledge of AGENT CANDID if she’s caught 
  fiddling overseas – she’s got so many spells on her to ensure 
  her loyalty that it’s literally unthinkable for her to go rogue.4 
  If a situation might involve having to abandon an agent and 
  claim that the Laundry knows nothing of her mission, then 
  it’s best to use an agent who can actually act without the 
  Laundry’s knowledge. External Assets aren’t always marked 
  as being part of the Laundry; they just don’t have the same 
  patina on their souls.
  Problematic Missions
  Problematic sounds much better than ‘suicide,’ after all.
  When CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN comes, the Laundry 
  will expand and unfold, taking on more and more power 
  as it effectively becomes an emergency government for the 
  duration of the crisis. All those pointless bureaucrats and 
  overstaffed departments will suddenly become vital to the 
  survival of our society in a recognisable form. Until then, 
  the Laundry must protect itself and its internal staff.
  That means that when a mission is expected to end with the 
  deaths of most or all of those assigned to it, the Laundry 
  turns to External Assets. They’re not part of the machine, 
  and the machine – inefficient, slow and blind as it is – 
  can carry on without them. Problematic missions are not 
  undertaken lightly, but when they are necessary, the Laundry 
  does not shirk from sending men and women and things to 
  their deaths. 
  Licence to Thwart
  Some highly trusted External Assets don’t have a defined 
  mission. They’re allowed to act on their own initiative. 
  These Assets are deep in the occult underground. They 
  9
  ExTERNAL ASSETS
  4. At least, not without a lot of  prep before and/or a hell of  a lot of  psychic trauma after.
  External Assets
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  10
  hear of cult activity and supernatural events long before the 
  Laundry proper picks up those rumours, and can respond 
  more quickly because they don’t have to go through 
  multiple committee meetings and signoffs with Operational 
  Oversight. These Assets have a License to Thwart as they 
  see fit.
  Usually, these Assets are given a particular zone (“This city 
  is yours – make sure nothing eats it.”) or field of expertise 
  (“Keep the ghouls quiet.”) and have carte blanche to operate 
  there. The Laundry knows that the Asset is the best expert 
  available, and will trust his judgement. As long as the Asset 
  gets results without causing too many problems for the rest 
  of the Laundry, Externalities is willing to tolerate eccentric 
  behaviour or non-standard methods.
  Playing an External Assets Campaign
  An External Assets game gets away from the form-filling, 
  the paperwork and the office-from-Hell jokes of a standard 
  Laundry Files game and focusses more on independent 
  agents. The characters have a lot more freedom of action 
  and a lot less support from Head Office. They don’t 
  need to worry about budgets, or political repercussions, 
  or being chewed out for breaking the law in the course 
  of a mission. Really, they’re much more like a traditional 
  roleplaying team of plucky investigators or spell-throwing 
  adventurers.
  External Assets games may suit some groups of players 
  better than a conventional Laundry Files setup. If your 
  players chafe at being restricted in what they can do, and 
  don’t enjoy the office humour jokes, then they may have 
  more fun in the looser, more action-heavy realm of an 
  External Assets campaign. 
  The downside is that you lose a lot of what makes the 
  Laundry Files unique and not just another “hunt the gribbly 
  monsters in the alleys of the modern world” game; try 
  upping the tradecraft and the Mythos horror elements to 
  compensate.
  Creating External Assets
  In a shocking development, most players in an External 
  Assets campaign play External Assets. If you’ve got access 
  to the Laundry Agent’s Handbook, you can use the rules 
  in that to create characters from outside the Laundry like 
  defectors or independent occultists as well as Deep One 
  hybrids or ghosts. License to Summon is also a useful resource 
  for creating traditional wizards and psychics. 
  Add another 150 skill points divided as you wish among all 
  skills, representing your External Asset’s greater experience 
  and toughness.
  If you don’t have access to those fine volumes, then create 
  a character using the standard character creation rules 
  from the Laundry Files rulebook, but instead of choosing 
  Assignment and Training during Step 8, you can instead 
  allocate 250 skill points among your skills as you wish. You 
  can bring skills above 75% during this step. Remember to 
  record your character’s Wealth Level – it’s more important 
  when you don’t draw a regular salary from the Laundry. 
  Madness Threshold
  External Assets get the same enhanced Madness 
  Threshold as standard Laundry officers (that is, they risk 
  temporary insanity when they lose more Sanity than their 
  POW score). 
  Status
  External Assets have a Status score, but don’t use it to purchase 
  equipment – that’s handled either by the Liaison Officer or 
  through the black market (see the sidebar). An Asset’s Status 
  measures the Laundry’s estimation of their reliability. A high 
  10
  Special Powers
  License to Summon gives rules for psychic talents and other weird powers, as well as expanded 
  rules for traditional sorcery and mental magic, and we strongly recommend using it for an 
  External Assets game. Many Assets have rare or unique talents beyond a knack for computational 
  demonology. That said, if you want to wing it without License to Summon, the Basic Roleplaying 
  Rules are easy to hack.
  A new power (either a psychic talent, a natural ability like a Medusa’s gaze or a magical gift) 
  can be modelled as a skill that starts at a percentage equal to the character’s POW score, and 
  costs either SAN or inflicts temporary POW damage when used. Taking a new power like this costs 
  10 skill points, and a character should have no more than two or three such powers at most.
  For example, Johnny McTavish’s “witch-finders’ eyes” is a skill that starts equal to his POW 
  (but can be increased through skill points or experience). Switching on his eyes costs him 
  0/1d4 SAN each time, but lets him see the supernatural aspects of his surroundings, as though 
  using a Tillinghast Resonator. 
  
  11
  Status means the Laundry considers the External Asset to be 
  a valuable and trustworthy agent, while a low Status implies 
  the agent is unreliable, sloppy or even suspect.
  Status may be increased by completing missions successfully 
  and quietly.
  Status decreases when a mission is botched or when an 
  External Asset creates problems for the Laundry. If Status 
  hits 0%, then the Laundry takes action against the Asset. 
  This could take the form of censure (a drop in pay), 
  the use of a geas or other magical compulsion, or even 
  termination. 
  11
  ExTERNAL ASSETS
  External Assets & Equipment
  There are three ways for an External Asset to obtain equipment – by requisitioning it from 
  the Laundry, by taking it as starting gear, or by purchasing it. 
  Requisitions:
  Equipment requisitions are handled by the team’s Liaison Officer using the standard rules (see 
  Chapter 11 of the Laundry Files Rulebook). The Liaison Officer controls the whole Budget for 
  the operation, and always uses his or her own Status when making rolls, even when trying to 
  draw equipment for another player character.
  Starting Gear
  An External Asset starts with some equipment depending on his Wealth Level.
  Destitute: Pretty much nothing except what he can scavenge.
  Poor: Three Easy items, one Average item. You can buy new Easy items without penalty.
  Average: Any Easy items, three Average items. 
  Affluent: Any Easy items, five Average items, one Difficult item. You can buy new Average items 
  without penalty.
  Wealthy: Any Easy or Average items, three Difficult items. 
  Purchasing Items
  Further equipment can be obtained in the course of the game. To find the right item, the 
  character must make a successful roll of a suitable skill, like Knowledge (Occult) to find a 
  dealer in magic wards, or Knowledge (Espionage) to find illegal weapons. To obtain the item, 
  the character must then make a Bargain test, modified as follows.
  Wealth
  Easy Item
  Average Item
  Difficult Item
  Destitute
  ½ Bargain
  N/A
  N/A
  Poor
  Bargain 
  ½ Bargain
  N/A
  Average
  Bargain x2 
  Bargain
  ½ Bargain
  Affluent
  Automatic
  Bargain x2 
  Bargain
  Wealthy
  Automatic
  Automatic
  Bargain x2
  For example, Penelope Hazard and Barry the Ghoul both want to purchase Class One wards on 
  the black market. First, they both have to find a source of such items by making Knowledge 
  (Occult) rolls. Both are successful, so both of them now get to Bargain for the item. The 
  cost of a Class One ward is negligible for Penelope, so she gets it automatically. Barry, 
  though, has to roll ½ his Bargain skill to scrape together enough gold fillings and stolen 
  grave goods to buy the ward.
  What if they needed Class Three wards? A Class Three ward is a Difficult item to requisition 
  in the Laundry, and that rarity is reflected on the street. Barry doesn’t have the cash to pay 
  for one (Difficult items are N/A for Destitute ghouls like Barry). Ms. Hazard is Wealthy, but 
  even she has to bargain for a potent ward like that one. 
  External Assets
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  12
  Creating	a	Liaison	Officer
  If a player wishes, he can play the External Asset team’s 
  Liaison Officer. There’s only one Liaison Officer per team, 
  so only one player character can take this role. 
  Create a Liaison Officer using the standard Laundry Files 
  rules. The Department of Externalities Assignment and 
  Training bonuses are +10% to Knowledge (Espionage), 
  Knowledge (Law), Knowledge (Politics), Status and one 
  of Sorcery, Science (Thaumaturgy) or Computer Use 
  (Magic). 
  Most Liaison Officers are veterans. If you’ve got the Agent’s 
  Handbook, then use the rules for veteran Laundry agents on 
  page 90. If you don’t, then you can simulate those effects 
  by reducing your character’s SAN by 5% for every five years 
  spent in the Laundry. Each five-year stint gives an extra 75 
  skill points divided among your skills as you wish. 
  Controllers
  The team’s controller is the equivalent of their manager 
  in a conventional Laundry game – the great and terrible 
  all-knowing NPC who sends them off on missions. Unlike 
  a manager, though, whose power comes solely from the 
  solid black line on the org chart, a controller must take 
  a more avuncular, hands-off approach to handling the 
  team. Controllers usually have some degree of a personal 
  relationship with every member of an External Assets 
  team.
  External Missions
  Illegal, excessively perilous, nigh-impossible – pick two out 
  of three, or have them all on a bad day. External missions 
  are nastier than the average Laundry operation. The tables 
  below have all the horrible things that you could possibly 
  want to throw at your External Assets team. They can also 
  be used to generate missions for regular Laundry employees 
  as humanity hurtles towards CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN (see page 82).
  The Mission
  What does the Laundry need done?
  1. 
  Eliminate, discredit or render a target.
  2. 
  Capture and recruit a potential asset. 
  3. 
  Steal a relic, grimoire or other artefact
  4. 
  Investigate rival occult agency.
  5. 
  Investigate a powerful cult or group.
  6. 
  Rescue a Laundry officer or British citizen.
  7. 
  Explore a recently uncovered Gate, underground 
  structure or ruin.
  8. 
  Break into a highly secure area to complete or thwart 
  a ritual.
  9. 
  Infiltrate a powerful cult or group.
  10. Infiltrate a rival occult agency.
  11. Destroy a powerful cult.
  12. Capture or banish a non-human entity.
  13. Investigate the death of a Laundry officer or another 
  Asset.
  14. Clean up someone else’s mess.
  15. Investigate someone powerful, politically connected, 
  or dangerous.
  16. Investigate a murder, disaster or other suspicious 
  incident.
  17. Do something illegal, dangerous and deniable to fulfill 
  the Laundry’s occult obligations.
  18. Go undercover in a perilous situation.
  19. Run a false flag operation, using another group as 
  cover.
  20. Roll again twice and combine the two mission profiles.
  Location
  Where does the mission take place?
  1. 
  Within the Laundry.
  2. 
  Major metropolitan area – London, New York, 
  Beijing.
  3. 
  Major UK city.
  4. 
  Smaller UK city.
  5. 
  Smaller foreign city or town.
  6. 
  Rural UK.
  7. 
  Rural section of a foreign country.
  8. 
  At sea or near the coast.
  9. 
  Historical landmark – the Coliseum, Mad King 
  Ludwig’s Castle, Burj Khalifa.
  10. Isolated or uninhabited region - getting there isn’t easy.
  11. Global flashpoint - somewhere that’s in the middle of 
  war, disaster or other crisis.
  12. Extremely isolated region – island in the middle of 
  nowhere, top of a mountain, etc.
  13. Extremely dangerous region – deep desert, jungle, 
  polar ice cap, etc.
  14. Ruin or underground.
  15. Mobile location (ship, aircraft).
  16. Extremely secure location (military base, Black 
  Chamber vault, high-security prison, etc.).
  17. Dreamlands/Other Place.
  18. Offworld.
  19. Warped, tainted or parallel version of another location 
  (roll again for base reality).
  20. Globetrotting operation - roll again twice.
  12
  
  13
  The Twist
  What makes this one really tricky?
  1. 
  Predictive Branch says that there’s a high probability 
  of an apocalypse this afternoon.
  2. 
  Fly off to some exotic overseas location where people 
  want to kill you.
  3. 
  There’s a time limit, and the clock is ticking…
  4. 
  The Laundry can’t help directly – the mission involves 
  skirting the edges of the law.
  5. 
  Someone who looks human isn’t.
  6. 
  The enemy is forewarned about the characters’ 
  involvement.
  7. 
  That’s a lot of firepower.
  8. 
  That’s an awful lot of tentacles.
  9. 
  Someone’s betrayed – or is about to betray – the 
  characters.
  10. At least one other faction has taken an interest in the 
  case.
  11. One of the characters is somehow personally 
  entangled in the mess.
  12. It’s a traaaaaaap!
  13. The real situation is nothing like the mission briefing.
  14. One of the characters gets infected/wounded/
  possessed and isn’t operating at full effectiveness
  15. It’s a set-up – not necessarily a trap, but someone’s 
  using the characters to do the dirty work. 
  16. When they said “sleeping god,” they were only half 
  right.
  17. Multiple civilians are in the area – their safety is 
  paramount.
  18. There’s a tricky diplomatic aspect to this mission – 
  please don’t start World War III.
  19. This mission doesn’t exist and never happened. No 
  evidence, no witnesses.
  20. Roll again twice.
  Hostiles
  Who are the opposition? External Assets play for higher 
  stakes – they’re less likely to be sent after clueless computer 
  geeks or wannabe occultists. They’re up against ancient 
  cults and godlike entities.
  1. 
  Clueless cult.
  2. 
  Terrorists or another mundane threat.
  3. 
  Private organisation or group.
  4. 
  Corporation.
  5. 
  Dangerous, but ultimately human cult.
  6. 
  Mythos Cult.
  7. 
  Mythos Cult.
  8. 
  Extremely powerful Mythos cult (Black Brotherhood 
  etc.).
  9. 
  Malignant and powerful sorcerer. 
  10. BLUE HADES.
  11. DEEP SEVEN.
  12. Another autonome species (Ghouls, Shoggoths, Mi-
  Go etc.).
  13. Lesser (level 4) entity.
  14. Greater (level 5) entity.
  15. Rival European OCCINTEL group.
  16. Black Chamber.
  17. Thirteenth Directorate.
  18. Nameless Bureau.
  19. Rogue state.
  20. Unknown threat.
  13
  ExTERNAL ASSETS
  External Assets
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  14
  Time marches on, and entropy gets us all in the end. Or we may wish it did – those who live to see the horrors to come 
  will envy the dead.1 The personnel files in the Laundry Files rulebook are current to the start of The Fuller Memorandum. 
  In this chapter, we’ll bring them up to date with The Apocalypse Codex.
  14
  Updated Personnel
  “This is not a game, Mr. Howard. Your new pay grade comes with strings attached; I am not referring 
  to the management training. Further advancement as an officer within this service will put you in 
  situations where you will be responsible for whether other people live or die—this is inevitable as we 
  move closer to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Worse: it is likely that you will encounter situations 
  where you must choose who to save and who to cast adrift, answerable only to your oath of service and 
  your conscience.”
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  1. And we’ll be able to tell them so in person, when they come hammering at our doors looking for braaaaains. 
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  Howard, Robert  
   
   
  a g e :  35
  P o s i t i o n :  SSO4(L),Darkside Hacker Externalities Asset Liaison
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 11 
  CON 11 
  SIZ 13 
  INT 16 
  POW 17
  DEX 9 
  CHA 12 
  EDU 18 
  SAN 35 
  HP 12
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Equipment: Bob carries a Class III ward and his Necronomiphone everywhere 
  he goes. He’s cleared to use all manner of exotic weapons, but he’s a demon 
  with a Basilisk Gun.
  Skills: Appraise 35%, Astral Projection 25%, Bargain 25%, Bureaucracy 50%,  
  Computer Use (Hacking) 65%, Computer Use (Magic) 70%, Computer Use 
  (Programming) 60%, Computer Use (Repair) 40%, Cthulhu Mythos 55%, 
  Empathy 20%, Disguise 25%, Firearms (Esoteric) 70%, Firearms (Pistols) 45%, Insight 45%, Knowledge (Occult) 
  65%, Knowledge (Law) 20%, Knowledge (Espionage) 40%, Listen 45%, Repair (Electronics) 50%, Research 65%, 
  Sense 30%, Soul Eating 17%, Spot 40%, Science (Mathematics) 60%, Science (Thaumaturgy) 65%, Sorcery 65%, 
  Stealth 30%, Status 60%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  Things are getting better; it’s been ten months and I only wake 
  up screaming about once a week now. The physiotherapy is 
  working and my right arm has regained eighty percent of  its 
  strength. The surviving members of  the Wandsworth Cell of  
  the Brotherhood of  the Black Pharaoh have been arrested and 
  detained indefinitely at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, in accordance 
  with the secret supplementary regulations in Appendix Six of  
  the Terrorism Act (2003); and every day, in every way, my life 
  is getting better and better.
  (The happy pills help, too.)
  – The Apocalypse Codex
  They finally got him. 
  Not the cultists, or the Black Chamber, or the eldritch 
  horrors. 
  No, he’s one of them now. Management.
  When we last looked in on Bob, just before the events 
  of THE JENNIFER MORGUE, things were going pretty 
  well for him. He and Mo were married (following a last-
  ditch attempt to shake off the ghost of Ian Fleming), his 
  career as a field officer was going well, and he was still 
  running bits of the Laundry’s IT department when not 
  playing fetch for Angleton. He even had a good working 
  relationship with his bosses.
  
  15
  15
  UPDATED PERSONNEL
  HOWARD, Robert: PERSONNEL RECORD (Cont.)
  Things have changed. They changed in the crypts of 
  London’s Necropolis, Brookwood cemetery, when the 
  Black Brotherhood tried to seize control of the entity 
  known as TEAPOT, aka the Eater of Souls. That night, Bob 
  died – for a few minutes, anyway – and was resurrected. 
  The Black Brotherhood attempted to use the Fuller 
  Memorandum to bind the Eater of Souls, but succeeded 
  only in binding Bob to himself. Still, Bob and Angleton 
  are now entwined on some level. As he puts it, he’s the 
  apprentice to the Eater of Souls, and the experience left 
  him with some abilities that he’s not comfortable with.
  Both he and Mo try to make their marriage work, but 
  it’s not easy when she’s the Laundry’s lead violinist and 
  he’s the chosen one of the departmental monster. That 
  level of strain makes things tricky, and that’s before you 
  add foreknowledge of the impending apocalypse into the 
  mix. They try to stay sane. They mostly succeed.
  As of THE APOCALYPSE CODEX, Bob’s management. He 
  now works for the Department of Externalities, under 
  Gideon Lockhart. The Laundry’s girding its loins, and 
  that’s not much fun for this particular loin.
  Bobs Wound: The Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh 
  – well, two low-ranking cannibal goons called Julian 
  and Jonty – snacked a chunk of Bob’s arm. He’s still 
  got problems using his left hand for anything. In game 
  terms, if Bob has to use his left arm for anything, the 
  Difficulty increases by one step (Easy becomes Average, 
  Average becomes Difficult and so on). 
  Eater of Souls: Possibly as a result of the botched binding 
  ritual, or possibly because the stress and pain opened 
  his Third Eye, Bob’s picked up some interesting quirks. 
  He’s got Astral Projection, Empathy and Soul Eating.
  • 
  Astral Projection: Bob can open his inner eye and 
  step out of his body to see the Other Place. Bob’s still 
  tethered to his body, so he can’t stray far (although 
  he sometimes finds himself on the Plateau of the 
  Sleeper – he’s connected to the Wall of Pain now). 
  Using this power costs Bob 1/1d4 SAN.
  • 
  Empathy: He can read emotional states. He uses a 
  traditional sorcery spell (via a quick-cast macro) to 
  boost his skill when he has to read someone else’s 
  mind. It costs only 0/1 SAN on most targets; insane 
  or inhuman minds can bleed through into Bob.
  • 
  Soul Eating: There’s an unwelcome fringe benefit to 
  being associated with the preta manger, the hungry 
  spirit. Bob can snack on the souls of others. Doing 
  so requires a successful POW vs. POW contest on 
  Bob’s part. If he wins, the target dies. So far, Bob’s 
  only used this power on humans, and he’s always 
  won the contest. It costs him 1/1d10 SAN every time 
  that he uses it.
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  Agent CANDID (Dominique O’Brien) 
  a g e :  36
  P o s i t i o n :  Epistemological Warfare Specialist
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 12 
  CON 14 
  SIZ 12 
  INT 17 
  POW 18
  DEX 14 
  CHA 14 
  EDU 19 
  SAN 30 
  HP 13
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Artefacts: The Violin, Personal Ward III
  Skills: Appraise 40%, Climb 60%, Cthulhu Mythos 45%, Disguise 65%, Dodge 
  50%, Etiquette 55%, Fast Talk 40%, Firearm (Pistol) 65%, Firearm (Exotic) 50%, 
  Hide 60%, Insight 60%, Knowledge (Occult) 65%, Knowledge (Philosophy) 80%, 
  Perform (Violin) 90%, Research 70%, Science (Mathematics) 75%, Sorcery 35%, 
  Spot 65%, Status 70%, Stealth 65%, Strategy 60%, Teach 65%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  Like me, my wife works for the Laundry; unlike me, she keeps 
  one foot in the outside world, holding down a part-time lectureship 
  in Philosophy of  Mathematics at King’s College. (Maintaining 
  that much contact with everyday life is central to keeping Agent 
  CANDID sane—I’ve seen what the other half  of  her job does 
  to her, and it’s heart breaking.)
  – The Apocalypse Codex
  Since the events in Brookwood Cemetery, Mo’s 
  aggressively pushed for a measure of normality in her 
  home life, even as her professional life involves less 
  abstract philosophy and more nightmarish cult rituals. 
  She’s got friends outside the Laundry, she and Bob have 
  a relatively stable marriage, and she tries to keep herself 
  sane and grounded.
  She needs it. She’s become one of the Laundry’s key 
  assets, with enough influence to push back against 
  Angleton if she has to. Unlike Bob, who’s getting 
  shunted towards a management role, CANDID will be on 
  the front line when the shooting starts.
  Updated Personnel
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  16
  16
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  Lockhart, Gideon  
  a g e :  mid-fifties (or so it appears)
  P o s i t i o n :  SSO8(L), Department of Externalities
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 15 
  CON 14 
  SIZ 14 
  INT 16 
  POW 17
  DEX 12 
  CHA 13 
  EDU 20 
  SAN 40 
  HP 14
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Skills: Appraise 60%, Art 50%, Bureaucracy 70%, Command 65%, Computer Use (Magic) 40%, Cthulhu Mythos 
  45%, Etiquette 70%, Insight 75%, Knowledge (Espionage) 85%, Knowledge (Politics) 70%, Persuade 70%, 
  Status 70%, Strategy 80%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  An observer, familiar with the internal pecking order of  the Laundry, might at this point be justifiably taken aback. Here is 
  Gerald Lockhart, SSO8(L), a middling senior officer in the backwater that is External Assets—a department most people (who 
  are aware of  it) think spends its time keeping track of  loaned laptops—grilling DSS Angleton, a Detached Special Secretary (or, 
  as scuttlebutt would have it, a Deeply Scary Sorcerer), one of  the famous old monsters of  the Operations Directorate: a man so 
  wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels. But a typical observer wouldn’t 
  understand the nature of  External Assets. Or, indeed, be aware of  Gerald Lockhart’s real job.
  – The Apocalypse Codex
  Gideon Lockhart runs the Laundry’s external assets division. He’s one of the big players outside of Mahogany Row 
  itself – his well-appointed corner office speaks volumes about his standing and pull within the Laundry. He’s on 
  first-name terms with Angleton and other powers. Mr. Lockhart is very sharp and very, very dangerous – and unless 
  you’re cleared, you won’t even know he exists.
  Oh, there are traces. Dig into the stacks, and his name shows up unredacted in a few old mission reports. He was 
  an exemplary field officer earlier in his career, and won the respect of Mahogany Row by combining confidence, 
  tactical nous and charm with an undeniable ability to get things done. He may even be still mostly human, all things 
  considered.
  Lockhart does not suffer fools lightly. Unlike Angleton, who is at least tangentially attached on the Laundry’s 
  standard-issue org chart thanks to his role in CPU and Arcana Analysis, Lockhart’s role insulates him from the 
  ‘B team,’ the gibbering horde of bureaucrats and marginally competent employees who make up the bulk of the 
  Laundry’s staff. He’s used to working with the best, which means he expects excellence (and, when necessary, 
  sacrifice) from both his underlings and his assets.
  Physically, he looks to be in his mid-fifties. Fit and dapper, with a grey moustache and a military bearing, the sort 
  who’s probably got a knife strapped to his leg behind his Savile Row suit.
  
  17
  17
  UPDATED PERSONNEL
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  BASHFUL INCENDIARY (Persephone Hazard) 
  a g e :  31
  P o s i t i o n :  Private Consultant
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 14 
  CON 16 
  SIZ 10 
  INT 18 
  POW 20
  DEX 17 
  CHA 16 
  EDU 20 
  SAN 40 
  HP 14
  Damage Bonus: -
  Artefacts: At a bare minimum, she packs a Class III Ward and her personal 
  Athame ritual dagger. It’s disguised as a silver crucifix, and gives a +2 bonus 
  to the POW of any ritual magic spell she casts (and can injure creatures that 
  are immune to conventional weapons). 
  She also owns a set of ritual robes originally designed for Aleister Crowley. 
  The robes themselves are kept in a climate-controlled and warded case in 
  London, but by combining her Astral Projection and Eidetic Memory skills, she can visualize herself wearing the 
  robes in the Other Place and gain their benefit – a +10% boost to her Sorcery skill.
  She’s also got a large collection of… souvenirs, from the Network days.
  Skills: Appraise 60%, Astral Projection 60%, Athletics 70%, Climb 65%, Command 45%, Computer Use (Magic) 
  65%, Cthulhu Mythos 40%, Disguise 60%, Drive 65%, Eidetic Memory 60%, Fast Talk 50%, Fine Manipulation 
  65%, Gaming 40%, Hide 60%, Insight 50%, Knowledge (Accounting) 45%, Knowledge (Espionage) 65%, Intuition 
  70%, Language (Italian) 100%, Language (English) 50%, Language (Enochian) 55%, Listen 50%, Persuade 55%, 
  Research 55%, Science (Thaumaturgy) 70%, Sense 60%, Sleight of Hand 65%, Sorcery 80%, Spot 60%, Stealth 70%, 
  Strategy 50%, Swim 50%, Track 40%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  The witch wears an understated gray wool dress with black tights 
  and kitten heels; with her hair pulled tightly back and minimal 
  makeup, she exudes a gamine charm. She moves fluidly, as if  
  only loosely bound by gravity. Lockhart thinks she carries herself  
  like a dancer; but he notices the hardened skin on the backs of  
  her hands—deftly obscured by a smudge of  concealer across her 
  knuckles—and the loose sleeves that conceal her shoulders and 
  upper arms. The Nutcracker ballet, for Karate and Krav Maga, 
  perhaps.
  – The Apocalypse Codex
  The BASHFUL INCENDIARY dossier contains everything 
  that the Laundry officially knows about young Ms. 
  Hazard. She first crossed their radar when she was eight 
  years old; she showed up at a refugee camp in Bosnia. 
  She was mute, and no trace was ever found of her family 
  or prior history. An incident at the camp showed a 
  precocious occult talent – or something watching over 
  her. Two would-be child rapists got their souls eaten 
  by something. She went from the camp to the streets of 
  Italy, living hand to mouth as a thief and beggar. Then, 
  two years later, a wealthy Italian couple with their own 
  suspicious occult history adopted her. 
  Placed in a good school, Persephone thrived. It’s also 
  likely that her parents arranged for the best tuition in 
  occult matters, because by the time they were murdered 
  six years later, she was ready to take revenge. The 
  killers – possibly agents of the Red Skull Cult – were later 
  found dead in a lake, showing clear signs of paranormal 
  intervention.
  With her parents’ money and resources, Persephone set 
  up the Hazard Network, a highly successful private occult 
  intelligence consultancy. She recruited several other 
  equally-talented agents, and spent the next five years 
  building a stellar reputation as a witch, troubleshooter 
  and problem-solver. She dissolved the Hazard Network 
  seven years ago, paid off her staff, and retired to the UK 
  – a twenty-four-year-old millionaire with an inherited 
  noble title, a sizeable property portfolio, and an eclectic 
  education. As far as the world is concerned, she’s a 
  socialite who takes an interest in a few charities and is a 
  patroness of certain avant-garde artists. 
  As far as the Laundry’s concerned, she’s BASHFUL 
  INCENDIARY – one of their best External Assets.
  She’s a talented ritual practitioner, but also has a knack 
  for computational demonology, tradecraft, infiltration, 
  seduction, business affairs, languages… in short, she’s 
  a terrifyingly smart polymath with the looks of a model 
  (even unaugmented by a glamour), the body of a swimmer, 
  and the soul of something very, very old and powerful.
  Updated Personnel
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  18
  18
  BASHFUL INCENDIARY (Persephone Hazard): PERSONNEL RECORD (Cont.)
  Persephone’s Organisation: While the Hazard Network 
  is no longer extant, Persephone still has a wide range 
  of contacts and assets across the world. In England, she 
  has a townhouse that contains a well-equipped occult 
  laboratory and armoury, as well as a private training 
  ground. She’s also got a number of safehouses, bank 
  accounts and backup identities in key locations across 
  the globe, but England – and the Laundry – is where she 
  intends to ride out CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
  Persephone’s Gifts: Persephone’s a trained psychic – she 
  can Astrally Project out of her body, at the cost of 1/1d4 
  SAN. Her gift of Intuition gives her an inhuman level 
  ability to make lucky guesses, while her Eidetic Memory 
  lets her perfectly recall what she has read. She’s also 
  adept at using these skills to augment her traditional 
  ritual magic. She also knows a word of power that 
  allows her to slow down time, allowing her to reroll any 
  physical skill check. Speaking this word of power costs 
  her a permanent point of CON. 
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  PRINCE, Johnny (Johnny McTavish) 
  a g e :  38
  P o s i t i o n :  Private Consultant
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 17 
  CON 18 
  SIZ 16 
  INT 14 
  POW 19
  DEX 14 
  CHA 11 
  EDU 16 
  SAN 40 
  HP 17
  Damage Bonus: +1d6
  Artefacts: In addition to a Ward, Johnny carries a knife given to him by the 
  Duchess. This throwing dagger hits unerringly (it cannot be dodged), and 
  inflicts an extra 1d6 damage per round until removed as it feeds on the blood 
  of the victim. The blade can injure creatures normally immune to weapons.
  During the events of The Apocalypse Codex, he also uses a Shunt Talisman. 
  Skills: Athletics 75%, Brawl 90%, Climb 70%, Computer Use (Magic) 45%, 
  Command 50%, Cthulhu Mythos 40%, Demolitions 80%, First Aid 70%, Grapple 75%, Hide 75%, Jump 80%, 
  Navigate 65%, Pilot (Small Plane) 70%, Sorcery 50%, Spot 80%, Stealth 75%, Track 75, Throw 80%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  McTavish is easy to pigeonhole, hence doubly dangerous: in jeans and a hooded top he looks like a brickie, except I know what 
  the side-long flat stare and the ridges on the sides of  his hands mean. He reminds me of  Scary Spice, one of  Alan Barnes’s little 
  helpers—specialty: ferreting down rabbit holes full of  blood-drenched cultists and undead horrors. The resemblance isn’t perfect, 
  but I’ve met NCOs in special forces before and he’s got that smell. Although there is a slight some-thing else about him as well: he 
  punches above the weight.
  – The Apocalypse Codex
  Bob got a pretty good read on JOHNNY PRINCE in their first meeting – Johnny is indeed ex-special forces, having 
  served his time with the French Foreign Legion’s parachute regiment. The Hazard Network recruited him out of the 
  army, and he stayed with Persephone as her bodyguard and lieutenant after she retired to England. He calls her 
  ‘Duchess’ and he is utterly loyal to her. They work well together. Hell, she’s raised him from the dead several times, 
  and that’s a real mark of friendship. You have to really trust someone to believe that they’ll bring the real you back, 
  and not Ye Liveliest Awfulness. There are fates much worse than death.
  And how did Johnny end up in the French Foreign Legion? Well, his family comes from Scotland. Specifically, the 
  isolated parts of the west coast, where certain small kirks still hold congress with Those From Below. MacTavish 
  doesn’t have the Innsmouth Look, but he’s definitely touched with strangeness. He dreams of a pyramid on a dead 
  world, and he knows that the thing that sleeps in that pyramid is in his blood and bones.
  Witchfinder’s Eyes: Johnny’s got Second Sight. When he concentrates and uses this skill, he can see his surroundings as 
  though looking through a Tillinghast Resonator. It costs him 1/1d4 SAN, plus the additional cost for anything he sees.
  
  19
  UPDATED PERSONNEL
  P e r s o n n e l  r e c o r d
  n a m e :  Panin, Nikolai 
   
   
   
  a g e :  mid-40s
  P o s i t i o n :  Thirteenth Directorate
  s u m m a r y :
  STR 15 
  CON 12 
  SIZ 15 
  INT 16 
  POW 17
  DEX 10 
  CHA 14 
  EDU 21 
  SAN 30 
  HP 14
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Artefacts: Panin carries a matrioshka ward. One of the Directorate’s little toys, 
  this ward consists of several nested dolls, each one carrying the soul of… well, 
  best not to say. Unlike a normal ward, which burns out if it’s hit by a spell it 
  can’t handle, matrioshka wards degrade gracefully. An average matrioshka 
  ward only loses a level of protection after the user fails three Luck rolls 
  instead of one. 
  Skills: Bargain 75%, Bureaucracy 60%, Command 70%, Computer Use (Magic) 65%, Cthulhu Mythos 40%, Disguise 
  55%, Etiquette 50%, Fast Talk 75%, Grapple 50%, Insight 80%, Knowledge (Espionage) 90%, Knowledge (Occult) 
  80%, Persuade 75%, Research 65%, Sorcery 65%, Status 80%, Strategy 90%.
  n o t e s ,  m i s c e l l a n y ,  e t c :
  Panin, whoever he is, is a player: his definition of  honourable might not encompass allowing me to escape with my life, but he’s 
  unlikely to start something in the middle of  a pub with an after-work drinks crowd.
  – The Fuller Memorandum
  The name’s patently false – “Nikolai Panin” was the KGB spymaster in Anthony Price’s cold-war spy novels. The face 
  is probably false too, or else Nikolai’s older than he looks. He remembers the Cold War very well indeed, and knows 
  the Laundry well enough to have crossed paths with Angleton on more than one occasion. 
  Panin uses a cover role within the Russian government – usually something in the diplomatic service – to hop 
  around Europe. He’s the Directorate’s point man and troubleshooter for all sorts of problematic situations, backed 
  up by some experienced headcrackers from Spetsgruppa V. He’s a Chess player, always two or three moves ahead 
  of the opposition, and he never runs an operation with just a single goal. He sets things up so that the Directorate 
  always comes out ahead on some level. 
  During the events of The Fuller Memorandum, Panin wasn’t able to get hold of the titular document (the binding 
  rite for the Eater of Souls), but he did come away with the instructions for making a copy of an Erich Zann violin, 
  and ensured the destruction of CLUB ZERO (the Black Brotherhood cell). 
  While Panin is willing to play cults and rival OCCINTEL groups off against each other, he’s still on ‘our’ side. He’s no 
  longer willing to take risks that might cripple the Laundry or another potential ally in the days to come.
  Updated Personnel
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  20
  During the events of The Apocalypse Codex, we see 
  ‘traditional’ ritual magic at its fullest. While Persephone 
  Hazard and her associates are certainly capable practitioners 
  of computational demonology, they’re also old school 
  wizards. Traditional magic is slower and more dangerous1 
  than computer code, but it can be more flexible, and there 
  are certain tricks that computers can’t yet replicate. 
  Adepts of traditional magic can see through the veils of 
  reality and perceive the truth. They call it the Other Place. 
  They’ve seen the face of horror. 
  This chapter doesn’t have many rules (for lots of extra 
  options for magic, see chapter 18 of the Laundry Files 
  rulebook and chapter 1 of License to Summon). It’s about 
  evoking the feel – and the horror – of sorcery. 
  What Magic Isn’t
  Like most of  my ilk I work best in a nice warm office, with a 
  honking great monitor and a can of  Pringles in front of  me. I 
  start swearing, under my breath, in Middle Enochian: it’s the only 
  thing that language is good for, cursing and ordering the walking 
  dead around.
  –The Fuller Memorandum
  The Laundry makes things seem clean. Sit in a beginner’s 
  lecture like Introduction to Computational Demonology and 
  listen as the lecturer talks about the Dee-Turing theorem, 
  about Dho-Nha curves cutting through Hilbert Space, 
  about energetic geometries, and it all sounds like a strange 
  form of science. No weirder than quantum mechanics, 
  anyway – counter-intuitive, yes, but nothing more. Tap the 
  button on your shinyphone, conjure up demons from the 
  vasty deep. Actually, don’t call them demons – call them 
  exonomic entities, so you can laugh at all those deluded old-
  school occultists and traditional wizards who thought they 
  were dealing with something supernatural.  It’s all just nice, 
  clean science.
  Wrong. 
  Step into the Other Place. 
  Magic violates reality. It corrodes it and fucks it up, warping 
  the sane little bubble of normality that humanity evolved in. 
  We’re not able to cope with it. Magic is not another set of 
  rules on top of ‘conventional’ physics, it’s a shifting maze of 
  power that twists and perverts physics. 
  Here’s an example – the Jotun working that the Nazis attempted 
  at the end of World War II required mass human sacrifice. 
  It was a grotesquely inefficient spell by modern standards, 
  sloppy and un-optimised and full of bugs and brute-force 
  solutions. A present-day version of the same spell would 
  require much less power, much less effort, and be cast in a 
  fraction of the time – and it would still need human sacrifices. 
  It’s not that the Nazis were cruel for the sake of it (well, 
  they were, but that’s beside the point.) It’s that the entities 
  on the other end of the line, the ones we summon up 
  through energised Dho-Nha curves, they have their own 
  peculiar tastes and whims that must be sated. They hunger 
  for human souls, for the sweet tang of blood, for the smoky 
  soul-marking of murder. The ‘rules’ of magic are set down 
  by entities older and crueler than we can imagine. 
  Working Magic
  All magic, even computational demonology, works on the 
  same principles. The magician draws an curve in the Platonic 
  realm of mathematic, energises it to attract the attention 
  The Other Place
  You’re a necromancer, Mr. Howard, not just another button- pushing computer nerd. That’s why they 
  sent you here with me. You have the aptitude for ad hoc invocation and control. I think you would be 
  extremely powerful, if you get over your squeamishness. It makes you as useful as a heart surgeon who 
  faints at the sight of blood.
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  1. Well, somewhat dangerous, anyway. What’s the old joke?
  C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
  C++: You accidentally create a dozen clones of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you 
  can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, “That’s me, over there.”
  JAVA: After importing java.awt.right.foot.* and java.awt.gun.right.hand.*, and writing the classes and methods of those classes needed, you’ve forgotten 
  what the hell you’re doing.
  C with the .alhazred library: You shoot yourself in the foot. It turns into a tentacle and tries to take over your brain. 
  C with the .celeano library: You realise your foot is a part of you… and that you are part of a higher-dimensional entity. You::your foot is equivalent to 
  Entity::you, if folded thusly. And then the nightmares begin, and before you know it, you’re standing naked in Tescos chanting ‘socks for the sock dog’.
  
  21
  ThE OThER PLACE
  of Something, and the Something reaches out from its 
  universe into ours. As the laws of reality are different there, 
  and Something carries the strangeness of its home with 
  it, it can alter our universe. The magician might bring the 
  Something through entirely (via a summoning or Gate), or 
  just ask the Something to intercede in a limited fashion (say, 
  to enforce the terms of a Geas, or to drag physics behind 
  the bicycle sheds and kick the shit out of it in an Entropic 
  Manipulation). 
  That’s the basic idea. In fact, it’s a lot more complex.
  First, just drawing a curve to attract an Exonome without 
  any other safety precautions is suicidal. It’s the equivalent of 
  smashing your nose off a wall, then sticking your head in a 
  shark tank. You’ll definitely get a response from something, 
  but it’ll eat your brains instead of doing what you want it to 
  do. Drawing the curve is the easy part – most of the work 
  in any incantation is basically laying down the ground rules 
  so the entity does what you want it to do when it shows 
  up. Think of it as a prenuptial agreement for your cerebral 
  cortex.
  Secondly, not every spell involves another entity. There are 
  Dho-Nha curves that fold back on themselves. Remember, 
  when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN hits, it’s because our 
  universe and the universes where those things squirm are 
  temporarily congruent. Why do they become congruent? 
  Well, what we think of as the constants of reality are very, 
  very slightly adrift. They can be pushed. In our universe, it’s 
  normally very very very hard indeed to move them. 
  You can’t change the speed of light just by wishing it was so. 
  In other universes, as discussed previously, those constants 
  aren’t tethered so tightly. Hastur the Unspeakable can change 
  its reality as it pleases, and can impose that reality onto ours 
  (and that’s how a Gate spell to Aldebaran works). When 
  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN arrives, our constants will 
  detach and our reality will become like theirs. 
  Even before that happens, though, there’s a tiny little bit of 
  a give in our universe. You can bend the rules slightly, and 
  act as your own Exonome, changing reality through your 
  own will. In practice, there’s almost always an easier way to 
  do this, but at least the risk of possession is minimal.
  Third, because magic involves calling on alien entities, you 
  have to dance to their tune. Some entities are as cold and 
  impersonal as the Inland Revenue, taking their pound of 
  flesh and sticking to contracts and bargains originally struck 
  by the Elder Things or some other pre-human sorcerers. 
  Others demand a more personal relationship with the 
  magician. Just because you know how to draw the right 
  curve and say the right words doesn’t mean that the entity 
  on the other end will respond as you expect. Some spells 
  that work for one practitioner won’t work for another if the 
  entity chooses not to co-operate.
  Computational demonology (and sorcery in general) usually 
  uses predictable entities. Something like a Feeder in the 
  Dark is about as smart as celery. Give it the right stimulus, 
  and it responds in exactly the same way. Most low-level 
  entities aren’t fussy; they’ll give up their reality-warping 
  The Other Place
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  22
  powers for anyone who buys them lunch and draws the 
  right curves. It’s only the more powerful entities that are 
  really problematic.
  Casting a Spell
  Despite the nigh-ubiquity of magic in the Laundry, where 
  everything from the Thing on the Doorstep2 to your 
  paperclips is an enchanted item of power, spells still aren’t 
  thrown around wildly. An act of magic – even a simple one 
  like activating an app – carries a measure of significance, 
  and deserves to be described.
  It’s important for every spell to feel different, but consistent. 
  The characters should be able to distinguish between, 
  say, a Computational Demonology banishing spell and a 
  traditional magic spell of the same type just by looking at 
  the physical evidence, but they should also be able to tell 
  they’re both related. 
  Pre-written apps
  I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy-fun icons glow 
  at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, 
  Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets 
  me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I 
  point the camera at the door and peer into the shiny screen.
  –The Fuller Memorandum
  Push button, dispense magic. It is, genuinely, that easy. 
  Activating a pre-written app is like picking up a ward or 
  other magic item – the effect may be interesting but the 
  act of using it is actually pretty simple. The fun with pre-
  written apps comes in describing the interface, in melding 
  occult weirdness with commercial gadgets. Does the app 
  have a prosaic, staccato name (Warding 1.1), an official 
  designation (Occult Field Countermeasures Utility Truck) or 
  some geek’s idea of a joke (Langford Death Parrot). How 
  does the interface work? What options are there?
  Different Types of Magic
  The Laundry Files rulebook describes the different styles of spellcasting, while the License to 
  Summon sourcebook gives tweaks and modifications to several of them.
  • 
  Pre-written apps: Magic for end users. Press the friendly icon, and the computer does the 
  rest. Advantages: easy to use, very fast. Disadvantages: bar a few basic parameters, you can’t 
  modify your spells. It’s great for quickly throwing up a ward or a defensive binding, but you 
  can’t tune a spell to a specific purpose.
  • 
  Computational Demonology: The thinking man’s magic. More accurately, the smart man’s magic, 
  because thinking about magic leads to your brain becoming snack food. Computational Demonology 
  is relatively easy to use (assuming you can both code and chant), very flexible, and very fast.
  • 
  Traditional Magic: The original sorcery. Great fun if you like drawing elaborate pentagrams, 
  dead goat proctology, and tongue twisters in Enochian. Numerous downsides: most sorcerers 
  need a lot of support from other casters, ritual items, sources of power or extra-dimensional 
  patrons, casting a spell takes a very long time, and if you get anything wrong, you’re screwed.
  • 
  Spell Macros: (See License to Summon) Take a traditional magic spell and cast most of it, 
  leaving only the final word of power to activate it. Then bind that uncompleted spell into an 
  item or a fetish or your own brain. When you want to cast the spell, say the word. It’s fast 
  (if you ignore the hours of preparation time needed to set up the macro), but just as dangerous 
  as traditional magic.3
  • 
  Mental Magic: Traditional magic, only without the assistance and safety net of the ritual 
  elements. See also suicide.
  Any sort of magic (bar unmodified spell macros and magic apps) can take advantage of local conditions 
  like sources of power, or peripherals like ritual items, more casters, or human sacrifices.
  2. Formerly Fred from Accounting. Really, he was Fred. Now he’s not Fred any more, not really. 
  3. With the added bonus of having half-a-dozen highly unstable magical constructs bound to your person. It’s like saying, “Cooking roast beef takes too 
  long! I’ll just bring a Molotov cocktail with me everywhere I go in case I meet a cow!”
  
  23
  The Gamemaster should work with the players to define the 
  limits and abilities of each pre-written app. If they’re too 
  constrained, then they’ll never get used. If they’re too open, 
  they’ll take away from full-scale computational demonology. 
  For the standard OFCUT suite, the basic apps allow:
  •	
  Banishing: Only at level one, which generally isn’t 
  much use - level one entities have trouble possessing 
  a hamster or a calculator or a Daily Mail reader. It’s got 
  a chance of banishing level two entities, and even an 
  ineffective banishing can irritate an exonome. Whether 
  or not this is useful is left as an exercise for the reader. 
  The standard Banishing app contains a dictionary of 
  invocations and dismissals for commonly encountered 
  types of exonome, as well as a more aggressive 
  banishing grid. 
  If the user knows what sort of beastie he wants to 
  banish, he can just hit the matching menu entry and 
  the phone4 will automatically recite the appropriate 
  formula of dismissal, backed up by a virtualised odour 
  of sanctity to give spiritual weight to the formula. In 
  this case, the phone’s screen displays the text of the 
  formula, complete with a little bouncing ball so the 
  operator can read along.
  If that fails, or if the entity is unknown, then the 
  phone can be used to generate a banishing grid. The 
  safe way to use a banishing grid is to link the phone to 
  a pentacle of some sort, then use a ward to constrain 
  the exonome, and then move the ward to force the 
  exonome into the pentacle. The unsafe way to do is to 
  grab your phone and stick it right into the exonome’s 
  face or closest analogous appendage. (Or, for a still-
  unsafe, but slightly stupid banishing, throw the phone 
  at the target5). The rune of the banishing grid shows 
  up on the phone’s screen in this mode, and often flares 
  brightly enough to burn its image onto the phone’s 
  phosphors. 
  When a creature is banished, it pops out of our reality. 
  If it had some mass, this mass may either explode 
  violently or leave with it, creating a vacuum. Other 
  banishings can throw off electrical fields, burst of 
  static or even fast neutrons. 
  •	
  Defensive Binding: A level one Defensive Binding 
  provides five points of protection. The standard 
  OFCUT binding is configured against fast-moving 
  projectiles (aka bullets) and other kinetic damage. It’s 
  possible to tweak the binding using the app’s settings, 
  but doing so requires a Computer Use (Magic) test. The 
  binding only works on humans (or at least humanoids), 
  and only on the person carrying the phone. In effect, it 
  projects a sort of force screen around the user. When 
  in operation, the phone glows brightly and tends to 
  drop calls. Defensive Bindings are a terrible drain on 
  the battery, and can deplete a fully charged phone in 
  minutes. 
  •	
  Entropy Manipulation: This spell is famously flexible, 
  and the options screen is infamously intimidating. The 
  manipulation app requires a Computer Use (Magic) to 
  adjust, although Science (Physics) is also a useful skill 
  to possess at this juncture – if you’re going to start 
  tweaking fundamental constants of your local reality 
  like G or c or me, it’s best to know what the hell you’re 
  doing. 
  Most versions of entropy manipulation come with 
  a list of presets for specific desired effects, like an 
  anti-eavesdropping scrambler (boosts the co-efficient 
  of entropy in sound waves, so their frequency and 
  wavelength shift irregularly), a Maxwell’s Demon 
  invocation (letting the user adjust the ambient 
  temperature) and a basic occlusion field (not invisibility 
  per se, but somebody else’s problem). 
  The basic version of this app generates a field either 
  centred on the phone, or else projected in a cone from 
  the phone’s aerial. If the user wants to constrain the 
  field, then he needs to set up a pentagram or other 
  binding shape, ideally in a conductive medium, and 
  then pair the phone with the binding pentagram. It’s 
  rather like pairing two Bluetooth devices, only it relies 
  on the principle of Contagion. 
  When running, Entropy Manipulation displays a 
  complex pattern of runes and equations on the 
  screen of the phone. A badly configured Entropy 
  Manipulation can result in unpredictable side effects. 
  Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be 
  shunted from one place to another like a bubble of 
  wallpaper paste. 
  If you try to, say, decohere the light so an infrared sensor 
  beam stops working, you can end up setting fire to the 
  curtains or cause all plants nearby to spontaneously 
  wilt. Health & Safety assures users, though, that 
  rumours of increased incidence of cancer associated 
  with heavy use of portable Entropy Manipulation 
  effects are largely false.
  4. We say phone, but all this applies to any computing device of sufficient power to run the app. Of course, phones are a lot more portable than other 
  such gadgets. You can run, say, Defensive Binding on your desktop machine, but good luck winning a firefight while dragging a plugged-in tower case 
  around with you. 
  5. To be honest, the paperwork involved in getting a replacement phone is arguably worse than death.
  ThE OThER PLACE
  The Other Place
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  24
  •	
  Exorcism: Everyone knows the old computational 
  demonology joke – it’s not an exorcism, it’s an 
  ‘XORcism.’ 
  (Pause for laughter).
  The spell works by hitting the local thaumic field with 
  a virtualised interference pattern designed to cancel it 
  out. It works out what normal should be, then tries 
  to squeeze out anything that doesn’t match. As self-
  aware abnormalities (aka Things That Go Bump In 
  The Night) can move and change, a basic exorcism 
  isn’t guaranteed to get rid of them – the spell can’t 
  distinguish them from what should be there. It works 
  wonders against static magical effects, hauntings, 
  psychic residue and all the other cobwebs of the 
  spiritual realm, but isn’t much cop against the spiders 
  who weave them.
  An exorcism spell cast from a phone sounds like a bell 
  tolling deep underground (albeit a slightly tinny bell, as 
  few phone speakers are up to much). The exorcism is 
  accompanied by a whiff of sulphur, and the phone’s 
  screen flickers like a candle. (Synthesised bell, binary 
  data file and a one-candle-power light source work just 
  as well as traditional methods.) 
  •	
  Glamour: The basic Glamour app takes a snapshot 
  of your face and looks for distinguishing features. It 
  then averages out your appearance with that of a face 
  from a database of forgettable, unremarkable people 
  that matches your gender, age and skin tone. It also 
  tones down your clothing, changing its colour and 
  erasing distinguishing marks and logos. The app is 
  designed to smooth out any visual artefacts (earlier 
  versions set up camp in the Uncanny Valley). When 
  running, it displays a soft, oddly compelling glyph that 
  does the hard work – glamours are 10% visual illusion 
  and 90% soothing suggestion that you shouldn’t look 
  too hard.
  The OFCUT app can import images of other people 
  and use them as a baseline instead of an image from 
  Database of Boringly Generic People, so it is possible 
  to, say, snap a picture of a uniformed security guard, 
  then use that image as a guide for the app so it creates 
  the illusion that you’re wearing that uniform as long as 
  no-one looks too close. The level one app doesn’t have 
  the power to convincingly disguise you as a specific 
  individual, but given a photo of that individual, it could 
  give the impression that you’re distantly related to that 
  individual.
  •	
  Scrying: The OFCUT Scrying app has three major 
  functions. First, it runs a TRUESIGHT program that 
  pierces any level 1 Glamours and displays any thaumic 
  structures, letting the user ‘see magic.’ In practice, that 
  means that the operator can see runes and binding 
  diagrams that aren’t currently active and glowing with 
  their own unholy light.
  Second, it functions as a thaumometer. It picks up 
  on any magical fields nearby (within four metres for 
  standard intensity fields; bigger invocations obey 
  the inverse square law) and gives visual and auditory 
  feedback to the user. (Translation: clicks like a geiger 
  counter, and paints a helpful arrow pointing towards 
  the big glowy alien horror). 
  Third, there’s a sympathetic magic scrying window 
  that lets you track a target, providing you’ve got a 
  sympathetic link to them like a photo, a personal 
  item, or a drop of blood to smear across your phone’s 
  camera. You can also, theoretically, observe the target 
  remotely, but that’s like trying to get 3G reception on 
  some deserted Scottish island. 
  All three forms of scrying integrate directly with the 
  phone’s camera. They don’t work on a camera-free 
  phone (although there’s an old version of the software, 
  designed originally for the Treo 600, which can run the 
  thaumometer without visual input). Scrying’s low-impact 
  in terms of glowy lights and special effects, although a 
  close examination of a scry-active phone shows that the 
  camera lens glows with an unnamable colour.6 
  •	
  Ward, Area: The Area Ward app has to be paired with 
  a diagram to be effective – otherwise, it just protects 
  the phone. The protective ward glows with an eerie 
  intensity on the phone’s screen. When the ward blocks 
  a spell (or an entity), the phone’s speaker hisses as a 
  portion of the spell’s information bleeds out as sound 
  waves.7 Paired with a diagram, OFCUT can protect 
  against level one spells or entities, and temporarily 
  impede more powerful attacks.
  •	
  Ward, Offensive: The Offensive Ward subroutine runs 
  constantly in the background on any OFCUT-equipped 
  device. If an unauthorised person touches the phone, it 
  alerts the phone’s registered owner and triggers feelings 
  of revulsion, anxiety or even pain in the mind of the 
  would-be thief. (Switch this off in settings before 
  letting someone borrow the phone.) While OFCUT 
  isn’t designed to include lethal countermeasures, some 
  6. You know when you drop your keys in the dark, and you don’t have a torch, so you shine your phone screen on the floor because it’s better than nothing. 
  Well, if that ever happens again, don’t use the weird alien light from a scrying camera. You’ll see the things that scurry in the dark, the Eaters of Odd Socks 
  and Dropped Biros, or the Stealers of Keys whose spoor is dust and unexplained scratches. 
  7. Same sort of thing as EVP, actually. 
  
  25
  users have set the Offensive Ward to automatically call 
  the Switchboard – and the Laundry Switchboard can 
  suck souls over the phone lines. The offensive ward is 
  invisible until activated, whereupon it glows a fiery red, 
  bright enough to be seen through the back of the phone.
  •	
  Ward, Personal: A phone can emulate a class one 
  ward – not much good, but enough to impede low-
  level brain suckers. When active, this app displays a 
  five-dimensional tesseract on the screen. Most people 
  mistake it for a screensaver. 
  Any competent computational demonologist can write up 
  a spell as an application. Optimising it so it runs as quickly 
  as an OFCUT app isn’t trivial – they’ve been tweaked and 
  streamlined – but it’s easy to stick an icon on someone’s 
  desktop that says “CLICK ME TO END WORLD.” End 
  users don’t have to know what’s going on under the case.
  Computational Demonology
  Magic being a branch of  applied mathematics, when you carry out 
  certain computational operations, it has echoes in the Platonic realm 
  of  pure mathematics – echoes audible to beings whose true nature 
  I cannot speak of, on account of  doing so being a violation of  the 
  Official Secrets Act. Theoretical Thaumaturgists are the guys who 
  develop new efferent algorithms (or, colloquially, “spells”): it’s an 
  occupation with a high attrition rate.
  –Down on the Farm
  Aka what Bob does, most of the time. Computational 
  Demonology isn’t just coding, although the Laundry prefers 
  to give the impression to newbies that everything’s very 
  safe, sanitary and entirely in silicon. While you can virtualise 
  most stuff, sometimes you’ve got to put the rabbit in the 
  silver-bladed runic blender to get results. Hell, back in the 
  early days, you’d have Laundry staff running around in black 
  robes with sacrificial daggers and drawing sigils in virgin’s 
  blood and myrrh, just like in the grimoires, only instead of a 
  high priest in the middle chanting away, you’d have a PDP1 
  in the middle of the grid crunching numbers and outputting 
  Dho-Nha curves. 
  In the modern era, scientific thaumaturgy has (mostly) 
  worked out what bits of the old rituals are necessary to 
  invoke Listeners, and which bits are just empty mummery 
  or transmissions from crazy-town. 
  Tools
  The basic toolset of the Computational Demonologist 
  consists of:
  • 
  A Turing-Complete programmable state machine, 
  also known as a computer. Verily, it is known that the 
  greatest wizards of yore hath top-end Alienware, and 
  woe betided those who quibbled over yon budgets.
  • 
  A suitable development kit, like a text editor that copes 
  with Unicode Plane 13, a c compiler with all of the 
  Laundry’s custom libraries, and a warded shell.
  • 
  A ward. Casting spells without protection is for 
  amateurs. Professionals take precautions.
  • 
  A charged geometry of some sort, depending on the 
  spell in question. If you’re summoning something, you 
  need a summoning grid. If you’re hiding from the thing 
  you just summoned, you need a protective circle. Any 
  spell that channels some sort of energy or influence 
  needs the right geometry. An old-school sorcerer would 
  draw lines in chalk or blood (or have something custom-
  made for each invocation out of silver or cold iron – 
  anything conductive works well), but a computational 
  demonologist can use lasers or a breadboard of copper 
  wires  to set up a geometry for the current situation. 
  • 
  A colloidal silver pen for drawing geometries and 
  runes by hand. While lasers are much more precise, 
  sometimes close enough is good enough, and it takes 
  ages to calibrate a laser pentagram. Also, remember 
  to bring along a protractor, because nothing’s more 
  embarrassing than letting the monster out of the 
  magic cage because you can’t draw a 60 degree angle 
  properly.
  ThE OThER PLACE
  The Other Place
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  26
  • 
  Talismans of contagion, aka Wi-Fi or bluetooth 
  dongles. They can easily be hacked using the Principle 
  of Contagion, so they’ll still channel magic even 
  when not plugged into a USB port. Once part of the 
  computer, always part of the computer.
  • 
  Pringles, pizza or other snack food. Caffeine and sugar-
  water.
  While the computer takes care of the hard8 bits, the 
  Computational Demonologist still has to set up the right 
  conditions for the spell. Most spells have some real-world 
  ritual elements. Summoning spells have a summoning grid, 
  for example.9 For other spells, the caster might have to wire 
  in peripherals, set up wards and circles, or provide that old 
  10cc of mouse blood. 
  There’s also the inconvenient fact that most spells require 
  an observer to collapse the quantum waveform at some 
  stage of the process. Not everything can be automated. 
  Bleed Through
  The strangeness of the Other Place bleeds through 
  technology in unexpected ways. Thaumic energy twists 
  things. Das Unheimliche, the Germans say, “the opposite of 
  what is familiar.” At low levels, it’s merely disturbing. Out 
  of the corner of your eye, the letters on your keyboard shift 
  and become alien glyphs. The red led power light blinks, like 
  the eye of something watchful and hungry. 
  At higher levels, you get more of a horror show. Cables 
  bleed when you unplug them. The keyboard taps out 
  messages from desperate ghosts. Users get cursed after 
  touching the keyboard with stigmata or exotic diseases 
  like ebola or bit rot. While most Listeners out there aren’t 
  sentient as we understand it, and don’t have the social skills 
  for mind games, an enchanted computing device can start 
  picking up on your subconscious fears and that’s when you 
  start seeing your dead mother’s name running as a process.
   
  Most of this weirdness is caused by leaky code. Doing 
  proper garbage collection on all your pointers to otherspace 
  and regularly exorcising your machine avoids the worst of it, 
  but it’s not completely avoidable. Magic corrodes our reality, 
  and even if you lock the magic away behind logic gates and 
  computer code, it still bleeds through on some level.
  Uses of  Computational Demonology
  Computational Demonology is faster, safer and more 
  efficient than traditional spellcasting. It’s the bee’s knees, 
  the cat’s pyjamas, the ghoul’s toothpick of arcane power. 
  It’s more reliable, easier to teach and easier to maintain. No 
  wonder everyone who’s at all clueful has switched to it.  
  There are still some spells and rituals that only work in 
  the traditional manner, though, and traditional magic is 
  easier to change on the fly if you know what you’re doing. 
  Computational Demonology also takes time – the actual 
  casting is faster than anything else, but if you don’t know 
  what you’re doing, writing the code can take a long time.
  Traditional Magic
  In her mind’s eye she is standing on an infinite gray plain, flat 
  and dusty, that sweeps away towards a horizon beneath the utterly 
  black sky above. She is wearing ritual vestments, a gown made to 
  a pattern designed by Jeanne Robert Foster to the specifications of  
  her magus; her hair is bound up with silver wire, and she holds a 
  blunt-tipped knife with two notched ivory blades bound together 
  by a band.
  All this is immaterial, existing only within her imagination—but 
  for a practitioner of  ritual magic, as opposed to a technician of  
  computational demonology, the set dressing of  the Cartesian theater 
  is a matter of  great importance. Ritual magic is unpredictable, 
  and the civil service hates it because it relies on the unaccountable 
  exercise of  power by the dismally eccentric, if  not un-house trained, 
  nor does it work as reliably as numerology or cabbalism, let alone 
  their infinitely more potent and reliable descendants, algorithmic 
  imprecation and computational demonology. Its practitioners 
  also tend to die young and horribly, of  Krantzberg syndrome or 
  something worse. But to a trained adept it delivers the power to 
  make a reality from the field of  dreams and visions.
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  Instead of generating a Dho-Nha curve through 
  mathematical procedures, the traditional practitioner (aka 
  witch) visualises the curve in their mind. Few witches do 
  this consciously, though. Instead, they follow a series of 
  chants and mental exercises that map to the curve. It’s like 
  the old example of a thrown football - most people couldn’t 
  calculate the parabola traced by the moving ball, but they 
  can do that calculation subconsciously in order to catch it if 
  you throw it at their faces. Traditional magic is like that, only 
  with a hand grenade.
  It’s unreliable, inefficient, and dangerous – but it’s real, 
  uncut, pure wizardry. There’s nothing between you and the 
  magic – it’s your will remaking the universe. For many a 
  practitioner, the thrill of magic is more addictive than any 
  drug.
  8. Or, more relevantly, the caster doesn’t have to stick a sign on his forehead saying ‘THIS SPACE FOR RENT TO SUPERNATURAL ENTITIES.’
  9. You can summon a thing without a summoning grid. If you’re lucky, it materialises right in the middle of your computer. If you’re unlucky, it latches 
  onto the closest sufficiently complex nervous system and eats you for lunch. 
  
  27
  Word and Deed – Casting Spells
  Words have no power on their own. Saying ‘Hastur Hastur 
  Hastur’ doesn’t summon anything,10 and neither does 
  abracadabra. Chanting in weird languages and waving your 
  arms around has no inherent meaning, but it does help put 
  the caster in the right frame of mind.11, 12 Effectively, a 
  written spell is a mnemonic for something that you can’t 
  consciously remember. It’s self-hyposis that twists your 
  brain inside-out. By following the ritual, the traditional 
  magician is able to visual the unimaginable. You say the 
  words, you believe, you put all your Magickal Will into it, and 
  if you’re lucky, you glimpse a vision of something strange 
  and twisted that you could never normally conceive. 
  (If you’re unlucky, then you put all your Magickal Will into 
  it, and something lurking like a trapdoor spider in the astral 
  plane pops out and eats your soul.)
  A talented practitioner can combine elements from different 
  spells, shaping the magic. Spells can be changed on the fly, 
  adapted to take advantage of circumstances, woven and 
  sculpted and changed like dreams. 
  Props and other ritual elements normally aren’t necessary, 
  but again, they help to produce the right mental conditions. 
  The wizardly robe and pointed hat are there for your 
  benefit, not because of any inherent power. That’s one 
  reason traditional magic is slow and inefficient – every spell 
  has lots of meaningless symbolic cruft that isn’t needed 
  for computational generation of a Dho-Nha curve. The 
  problem is that some spells actually do need the ritual 
  elements. Tracing a chalk pattern on the floor isn’t just a 
  symbolic act – it’s needed to keep the summoned demon 
  from devouring you. It’s easy to modify a traditional spell, 
  which means it’s easy to accidentally delete a vital protective 
  element and end up blowing your brains out.
  Uses of  Traditional Magic
  Traditional magic is slow and unreliable at everything 
  except getting your brain chewed up by demons, so why 
  would anyone sane use it? (A lot of insane people use it, but 
  they’ve got their own issues.)
  Firstly, they might not have a choice. Not everyone has 
  access to computational demonology, or the right computer 
  program. Translating traditional magic formulae to iterated 
  code isn’t easy, and some spells simply don’t translate – if 
  the alien Listener wants a human soul, then you need to get 
  the human element into the loop somehow.
  Secondly, traditional magic is easier to recode on the 
  fly. Redirecting an entropy manipulation spell using 
  computational demonology means a lot of messing with xyz 
  co-ordinates and vectors and trying to reconcile your phone’s 
  internal compass with the magnetic field of Aldebaran. 
  Thirdly, they can’t (easily) take it away from you. A naked 
  Computational Demonologist is a pasty-skinned nerd; a 
  naked warlock still has his wand, and can cast any spells 
  that don’t rely on ritual components. When you can remake 
  the universe with the power that stems solely from your 
  own mind and will, you’re as close as humanity comes to 
  godhood...
  10. Other than annoying memes.
  11. Out of it.
  12. Also, there are things Listening out there who recognise ancient commands once a connection is established through the platonic realm.
  Magic ‘Stunts’
  A generous Gamesmaster should give bonuses to a character’s effective POW or Sorcery rolls for 
  entertaining or thematic descriptions. Traditional magic offers a lot of scope for imaginative 
  players. Babble about silver-etched athames or symbolic correspondences or drawing on ley 
  lines for power. 
  ThE OThER PLACE
  The Other Place
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  28
  Gate Shunt
  (Level Three)
  Augmented reality for the win: my nascent necromantic spidey-sense doesn’t see anything, but 
  there’s a spiderweb of really nasty schematics tingling and twitching all across the door’s 
  surface. A fine thread leads from it towards the giant cross. I’ve got a nasty feeling that 
  if you touch the door without an invitation you’re going to get to ride on Jesus’s tree, and 
  not in a happy way.
  - The Apocalypse Codex  
  Teleportation is tricky and messy for anything bigger than an electron. Try to take a short 
  cut through conventional space-time, and you’ll end up splattered. If you set things up just 
  right, though, you can set up a short-range Gate that transports a single individual to 
  a predetermined location. The destination needs to have an active summoning grid or other 
  magical anchor. A shunt has a maximum range of the POW of the spell in metres. 
  You could, for example, teleport into a panic room or use the spell to, say, nail an intruder 
  to your decorative life-size crucifix, but you couldn’t teleport across the Atlantic (not 
  without boosting the spell with a staggering amount of power) or to get into a secure location 
  (at least, not unless you can get a properly entangled summoning grid in there first).
  Shunting is instantaneous13 if the destination grid is energised. If there’s no destination, 
  then the shunted target vanishes for a short time before reappearing nearby. More powerful 
  entities can break or resist a shunt attempt. 
  Being shunted costs 1/1d6 SAN.
  Common tricks using this spell:
  • 
  Shunt/Ward Combo: This is Raymond Schiller’s security mechanism. Touch the door without 
  the right permission, and the ward triggers the shunt, teleporting you onto the cross.
  • 
  Shunt Talisman: A custom magic item developed by Persephone Hazard, the shunt talisman 
  consists of a chain of paper dolls attached to a computer chip. Activate the talisman, 
  and it shunts up to three targets out of reality for 1d10 minutes. It’s a level three 
  effect, so a class three ward can block the attack. It’s also not especially accurate, 
  and just grabs the nearest three people to the dolls.
  13. Well, almost. We’re pretty sure it’s limited to c. 
  
  29
  P r e a m b l e
  This is a briefing document intended for the use of 
  Squadron 666 or SAS personnel who are about to be 
  deployed as part of CODICIL BLACK SKULL observation 
  and exploration missions. If this is the first time you have 
  been deployed offworld, ensure that you are familiar 
  with relevant safety, survival and security procedures. 
  O v e r v i e w
  The purpose of CODICIL BLACK SKULL is to ensure 
  that an entity known as the Sleeper remains secure and 
  undisturbed. The Sleeper currently resides in a tomb atop 
  an alien pyramid, surrounded by a forest of zombies called 
  the Wall of Pain. Our role is to ensure that no-one wakes 
  the Sleeper, and to put it back down should it ever rise.
  T h e  P l a T e a u
  The Sleeper’s tomb stands on a distant planet, across 
  the gulf of interstellar space. Attempts to locate it using 
  conventional astronomy have so far been unsuccessful. 
  Most researchers assume that it is somewhere within our 
  galaxy, but there are no guarantees of that. It could be 
  in another galaxy, or in another dimension, or be billions 
  of years in our past or future – or even all three. “The 
  Old Ones walk serene and primal between dimensions, 
  untrammelled by our petty notions of space and time” to 
  quote the Necronomicon.
  The planet – or at least the Sleeper’s Plateau – has a thin, 
  but breathable atmosphere, suggesting that at some 
  point life held sway here, cracking the oxygen out of 
  the bluish rocks. Foot patrols to the planet carry extra 
  oxygen supplies with them, but additional O2 is only 
  needed during periods of heavy exertion.
  The only native flora discovered by past expeditions is a 
  purple lichen that is mildly poisonous, but has powerful 
  hallucinogenic and oneiromantic qualities. Background 
  radiation is approximately 20 millisieverts per hour (or 
  as much as a nuclear power worker would absorb over 
  the course of a year) – hot, but not unmanageable. 
  The primary source of this radiation appears to be a 
  mobile source that orbits the planet once every six 
  hours, possibly a satellite or moon composed of highly 
  radioactive material.
  Gravity is approximately 70% that of Earth. The planet 
  rotates once every 31 hours. There is little discernible 
  seasonal variation in temperature, or in weather – you 
  can expect clear skies and whispering, maddening winds 
  year-round. Average temperatures hover just below 
  freezing. 
  The planet has no magnetic field. Directions therefore 
  use the pyramid’s sides as the cardinal directions. 
  Rock samples recovered from the Sleeper’s Plateau 
  show that the pyramid rests on a granite outcrop. The 
  rocks have a high proportion of selenium and cobalt, as 
  well as traces of elements without official names from 
  deep within the island of stability. The site appears to 
  have been selected at least partially for its geological 
  qualities; up until recent events, seismic instruments 
  found no signs of earthquakes or other volcanic activity. 
  Micrometeorite impacts are considerable less than 
  would be expected, suggesting some force protects the 
  plateau from disaster. 
  The rest of the planet is largely unexplored. Any Gates 
  opened to the planet appear on or near the Plateau. 
  Squadron 666’s aerial observations show signs of other 
  structures in the lowlands around the Plateau, but no 
  expedition has ever reached these cryptic mausoleums 
  and returned. 
  Exploring the Plateau has an extremely deleterious effect 
  on the human psyche. Even with wards, medication and 
  training, most visitors experience delusions or suffer 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  c o d i c i l  B l a c K  s K u l l
  T h I S  D O C u M e N T  I S  C l a S S I F I e D  C O D I C I l  B l a C K  S K u l l
  IF YOu DO NOT haVe CODICIl BlaCK SKull CleaRaNCe, DO NOT ReaD ThIS DOCuMeNT. 
  Version 5.42.
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  30
  
  31
  psychological breakdown within 48 hours. Therefore, 
  except in emergencies, all contact with the Plateau and 
  the Pyramid is minimized through use of supersonic 
  overflight.
  O P e R a T I O N S  O N  T h e  P l a T e a u 
  Standard insertion protocol is via a Class 3 Gate. As 
  such gates have an operational lifetime measured in 
  hundreds of seconds, you will either take your own 
  Gate-making technology with you, or have a scheduled 
  extraction time. 
  Radio on the Plateau is unreliable over distances longer 
  than 500 metres, and power drains faster there than it 
  does here. Electronic equipment fails alarmingly quickly 
  on the Plateau, so keep visits short and carry spares. 
  Take precautions – treat the Plateau as though it was 
  a radioactive hot zone, and always ensure that your 
  personal wards are active. Unwarded individuals perish 
  within a few hours of exposure to the Plateau. 
  T h e  P Y R a M I D 
  The Pyramid of the Sleeper is a four-sided stepped 
  pyramid, made from the same stone as the Plateau. It 
  is composed of approximately two million stone blocks.
  Analysis of the stone blocks reveals traces of partially 
  eroded symbols or markings. No translation exists, 
  although some cults have partial transcriptions of the 
  symbols and use them as part of their mysteries as a 
  substitution cipher.
  Despite the efforts of generations of astronomers, 
  astrologers, 
  numerologists 
  and 
  researchers, 
  the 
  pyramid does not appear to be aligned with any celestial 
  object, nor does it appear to conceal any clues about 
  the impending date of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Its 
  architecture does not correspond to that of any known 
  human culture. 
  There are no roads, ramps, quarries, waste tailings or 
  any other signs of construction around the pyramid. The 
  stones are mortared together with an unknown substance 
  that defies chemical analysis. It is a blackish-grey resinous 
  compound that is a perfect electrical insulator. 
  While dating methods based on radioactive decay are 
  unreliable without a better baseline for comparison, 
  most researchers assume the pyramid is less than ten 
  million years old.
  The size of the pyramid is a matter of debate. Scale 
  within dreams and visions is of course unreliable, and 
  visions of the pyramid being ‘miles high’ or ‘bigger 
  than a mountain’ can be discarded. However, four 
  expeditions recorded different heights for the pyramid 
  despite using reliable scientific instruments. The height 
  ranged between 120 and 180 metres. 
  This discrepancy continued into the CODICIL BLACK 
  SKULL era; observations by Concorde missions have 
  recorded multiple different heights for the pyramid. 
  These differences in scale cannot be explained by 
  human error or the movement of the pyramid (the area 
  is tectonically stable).   
  The steps are shallow enough to be ascended easily by 
  humans in this low gravity. Many reports from those 
  who have ascended the pyramid speak of falling into a 
  trace or experiencing bursts of missing time, as though 
  the monotonous act of climbing all of those steps is 
  hypnotic.
  In addition to the Wall of Pain at the foot and the 
  temple on top, there are several other sites of interest 
  on the Sleeper’s Pyramid:
  •	
  The	Rosetta	Stone: A series of stone blocks on the 
  ‘north’ face of the pyramid whose markings differ 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  32
  from the rest of the pyramid; in fact, linguistic 
  analysis suggests that there is a better than 80% 
  probability that these markings are in a completely 
  different language. This second language could 
  help translate the cryptic symbols on the rest of 
  the pyramid, and is the focus of intensive linguistic 
  research by the Laundry and several other groups.
  •	
  The	 Watchtower: The watchtower is a small 
  ruined structure located half-way up the south-
  eastern ridge of the pyramid. Most of the building 
  has collapsed, but computer reconstruction shows 
  that it was a twenty-metre-tall round tower made 
  of the same stone as the rest of the pyramid. It is 
  clearly a later addition, as the original steps are still 
  visible beneath the scattered debris. The bottom 
  quarter of the tower still stands, and was used as 
  a base by the fourth expedition. The stones of the 
  watchtower are unmarked. 
  •	
  The	Erratic: Located approximately one kilometre 
  from the pyramid, on the far side of the Wall of 
  Pain, this is a single carved stone block like the 
  ones that make up the pyramid. Why this stone 
  was rejected by the builders is a mystery. The 
  stone was dragged six metres south by persons or 
  forces unknown in 1992. 
  •	
  The	 Baron’s	 Mark:	 The fourth expedition found 
  a broken cavalry sabre (a shashka sabre, identical 
  to those used by Cossack soldiers) along with a 
  water bottle and some rags on the west face of the 
  pyramid. Someone – presumably Baron Ungern 
  von Sternberg – used the sabre to carve a large 
  ‘X’ into a nearby block. The Fourth Expedition 
  examined the block in detail, but reported nothing 
  unusual about it.
  •	
  The	 Door:	 The existence of secret tunnels and 
  chambers within the pyramid has long been 
  rumoured, but never confirmed, and ground-
  penetrating radar fails to penetrate the structure. 
  In 1947, the Laundry obtained a photograph of a 
  tapestry from a Tibetan monastery that appeared 
  to depict a door or passageway half-way up the 
  west face (near the Baron’s Mark). The Fourth 
  Expedition investigated this region, and found 
  nothing. However, in 1984, a BLACK CODICIL 
  overflight photographed six figures scaling that 
  section of the pyramid. The Concorde made a 
  second pass twelve minutes later, and found no 
  sign of the intruders. 
  •	
  The	Rapture	Walk: This is a section of the pyramid 
  near the temple. There are no discernible physical 
  signs that distinguish the Rapture Walk from the 
  rest of the structure, but two expedition team 
  members committed suicide here by hurling 
  themselves off the walk and falling to their deaths. 
  Furthermore, examination of the stones below the 
  Rapture Walk revealed the presence of old blood 
  and tissue, suggesting that other visitors also 
  committed suicide by jumping off that spot. 
  T h e  w a l l  O F  P a I N
  The Wall was constructed by the ‘Bloody White Baron 
  of Mongolia,’ Ungern von Sternberg, probably between 
  1919 and 1921. The Wall consists of two thousand, nine 
  hundred and ninety-four human corpses impaled on 
  stainless steel spikes. The Wall completely surrounds 
  the pyramid on all four sides, and is between three and 
  nine corpses deep all along its perimeter. 
  Most of the corpses are those of Russian soldiers from 
  the Fifth Red Army; the Baron appears to have filled 
  any gaps in the wall with Mongolian peasants or men 
  from his own rag-tag army. Despite being nearly a 
  century old, the corpses are well preserved thanks to 
  the cool temperatures, high radiation and lack of native 
  
  33
  bacteria. The corpses still wear their uniforms and carry 
  their equipment, including rifles and swords. Most of 
  the corpses’ weapons were found in their scabbards 
  or strapped to their backs, leading some researchers 
  to suggest that the weapons were returned after the 
  bodies were impaled. Rope burns and other scarring, 
  together with some signs of dehydration and starvation 
  imply that the victims were prisoners who were 
  marched alive onto the Plateau, then impaled. 
  The two-metre steel spikes are made from a high-
  chromium steel alloy, similar to stainless steel. Where 
  exactly the Baron got his hands on nearly three thousand 
  high-quality steel spikes in the middle of Mongolia is a 
  minor mystery. The fence was constructed with the aid 
  of the Bogd Khan’s priests, although the Baron appears 
  to have greatly modified their rituals.
  Injuries and post-mortem contortions strongly imply 
  that the victims were impaled on the spikes while still 
  alive. Most were impaled through the chest, but others 
  were impaled through the anus, or else impaled multiple 
  times through, say, the thigh and forearm. Marks on the 
  necks and faces suggest that the victims’ heads were 
  restrained at the time of death – they were probably 
  forced to stare at the pyramid as they died. 
  The Wall of Pain is one of the greatest examples of 
  occult countermeasures ever created by humanity. Its 
  purpose is at least three-fold.
  Firstly, it is a wall of nightmares. The necromantic 
  energy of all those deaths blocks the dreams of the 
  Sleeper. Extrapolating from written accounts and other 
  sources, it appears that nightmares of the Plateau were 
  much more common before 1921. This was, it seems, 
  the primary impetus behind Sternberg’s actions – he 
  saved the Bogd Khan from bad dreams.
  Secondly, the trapped dead observe the Pyramid, 
  blocking Gate spells and preventing anyone from using 
  magic to bypass the wall. They are also theorized to 
  observe the Sleeper, collapsing its quantum waveform 
  and keeping it partially quiescent. The effectiveness of 
  this spell is unknown. 
  It is possible that Sternberg’s actions prolonged the 
  quiet period before CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN; it is 
  equally possible that the Sleeper is unaffected by the 
  spell, and will wake on cue when the Stars are Right. 
  No-one wants to try kicking the Wall that might be 
  holding back the end of the world.
  Thirdly, the corpses that make up the wall are vessels 
  for possessor entities (Feeders in the Night). If anyone 
  trespasses too close to the Pyramid, the zombies wake 
  up and destroy them. The guardians of the Wall of Pain 
  are considerably tougher than the average Residual 
  Human Resource.
  Those killed by the zombies are then added to the Wall 
  of Pain. Squadron 666 observation photos are regularly 
  analysed for new additions to the Wall. 
  N a v i g a t i n g  t h e  w a l l  o f  P a i n
  Sternberg’s Wall prevents any intruder from reaching 
  the Pyramid, and so far has proved almost completely 
  impenetrable. Other than the 1984 incident, there 
  were no successful attempts by unwanted persons to 
  gain access the Pyramid until the Colorado ritual (cf. 
  APOCALYPSE CODEX, BLOODY BARON).
  The only known safe way to cross the Wall is with the 
  aid of TEAPOT, the ‘Eater of Souls’ entity that formerly 
  inhabited the body of Evgenie Burdokovskii, and is 
  currently incarnated in a security location. As TEAPOT 
  helped build the wall, it knows the transitive order in 
  which the Wall must be deconstructed to break down 
  the spell.
  Recently, a cult in Colorado managed to open two 
  Gates inside the Wall of Pain’s protected zone, a feat 
  that was previously believed to be impossible. Arcana 
  Analysis suggests that the Sleeper stirred and helped 
  them breach the containment field. If so, then the Wall 
  may become increasingly unreliable as the conjunction 
  approaches, raising the likelihood that troops will have 
  to be deployed to the Plateau to augment the Pyramid’s 
  security.
  T h e  T e M P l e  O F  T h e  S l e e P e R
  Atop the Pyramid is a temple containing the tomb 
  of the Sleeper. The temple is largely unexplored, 
  following the fifth expedition incident (see page 36). 
  However, through a combination of fourth expedition 
  photographs, eye-witness accounts and secondary 
  sources, we can state the following:
  The temple consists of 128 pillars, each 23 metres 
  tall and 2.5 metres in diameter supporting a domed 
  roof some 30 metres high at its apex. The temple is 
  a square with sides of 128 metres in length. There 
  are four entrances, one at the mid-point of each side 
  of the Pyramid. These doorways are 3 metres wide 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  34
  and 6 metres high, and have wooden doors. (The 
  wooden doors are a new addition, and are made from 
  Mongolian oak.) The pillars and door frames are all 
  decorated with disturbing alien glyphs and symbols. 
  As the scroll that lead to the possession of Evgenie 
  Burdokovskii was derived from the markings on the 
  temple, personnel are enjoined not to examine the 
  symbols without prior authorization and proper safety 
  procedures.
  Surrounding the tomb are rows of benches, made 
  out of a crystalline substance. Unlike the rest of the 
  cyclopean structure, these benches are human in scale. 
  They may be later additions to the Temple, as they do 
  not match either the surrounding architecture or the 
  style of décor. Each bench has a small gully behind each 
  seat, suggesting they were meant for some humanoid 
  species with a tail.1
  The Tomb of the Sleeper stands in the centre of the 
  temple on a raised dais. It is a sarcophagus four metres 
  in length. Markings on the Tomb are entirely unlike 
  those on the Pyramid or the Temple, suggesting that 
  the Tomb predates both edifices. The Tomb is the nexus 
  for a powerful thaumaturgical effect, probably either a 
  binding or a suspended-animation spell. Possibly, the 
  Sleeper was deliberately imprisoned here for some 
  purpose, or took refuge here to wait out the long aeons 
  until it could exist again in our universe.
  O p e r a t i o n s  w i t h i n  t h e  T e m p l e
  If the Sleeper awakens, it will trigger a series of events 
  that will lead inevitably to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. 
  Its return is a signal to the other Great Old One entities 
  that the stars are right and that they should return. It is 
  the first shot in the apocalypse.
  Therefore, you are advised and enjoined to stay well 
  away from the Temple. There are power sources and 
  magical forces buried deep within the Pyramid that 
  focus on the Temple. We do not know what might 
  disturb them. Damage to the Temple, touching the 
  Tomb, loud noises, the wrong thoughts – consider the 
  Tomb to be an unexploded and highly unstable nuclear 
  bomb, and keep clear unless there is absolutely no 
  other choice.  
  PReVIOuS exPeDITIONS 
  & CONTaCTS
  There are natural portals and dimensional fault lines 
  (aka ‘thin places’) where the Plateau touches our world. 
  Several of these portals are in Central Asia; other 
  confirmed portals exist in Antarctica. The Miskatonic 
  Expedition of 1931 encountered one such portal, when 
  Charles Danforth saw a bizarre vision that drove him 
  mad,2 likely as a result of a fleeting psychic contact 
  with the Sleeper.
  Images and stories of a wonderful and terrible Plateau 
  and sleeping kings are common in many cultures; the 
  Sleeper was out there, waiting, long before human 
  civilization arose. We grew up in the shadow of that 
  dreadful Plateau, and it has informed our myths and 
  nightmares throughout history.
  P r e h u m a n  C o n t a c t s
  •	
  Tomb	Builders:	Presumably, some race built the 
  Temple and the Pyramid around the Sleeper. 
  We know nothing about this species except the 
  structures that they left behind. It is unlikely that 
  they evolved on the world of the Dead Plateau, 
  unless some cataclysm (perhaps a previous 
  conjunction) erased all signs of their civilisation 
  and destroyed most of the biosphere.
  •	
  ANNING	 BLUE	 SKULL: The proximity of the 
  Plateau of the Sleeper to ANNING BLUE SKULL 
  ruins in Antarctica implies that they knew of its 
  existence. Certain bas-relief carvings in their 
  cities imply that they dreaded something in the 
  mountains near their city. 
  1. Possibly DANUBE CROSSING, but we would need to find some more examples of their choice in furniture to know for sure.
  2. Notably, according to Dyer’s account, Danforth spoke of “the elder pharos” and “the original, the eternal, the undying,” both of which 
  might be descriptions of the Sleeper – it is immeasurably old, it is not dead, and it signals its brethren when it is chow time.
  BLOODY BARON
  As per Section V.5 of the Second Treaty of Nice, all developments and information regarding the Dead Plateau 
  and the Sleeper are shared with the Laundry’s European partners on the BLOODY BARON committee. Please 
  review guidelines on information sharing and cross-agency encryption and warding when submitting any 
  reports with BLOODY BARON clearance.
  
  35
  •	
  DANUBE	 CROSSING: The pews in the Temple 
  certainly resemble their reputed physiology.
  •	
  BLUE	 HADES: We cannot be certain that BLUE 
  HADES had contact with the Plateau, but drawing 
  a line through the Church of the Sleeping Christ to 
  their inhuman patrons strongly suggests it. 
  P r e h i s t o r i c  C o n t a c t s
  • 
  Sigils matching those found on the Pyramid were 
  found in a cave in Afghanistan, and verified to be 
  more than 30,000 years old.
  • 
  The Mesopotamians worshipped (or placated) 
  fearful gods in pyramids. 
  h i s t o r i c  C o n t a c t s
  • 
  Awareness of the Plateau is ancient among the 
  mystics of Mongolia. The Priests of the Black 
  Buddha, an obscure religious order in Tibetan 
  Buddhism, conducted rituals that often involved 
  visions or physical pilgrimages to the Plateau. 
  The Priests of the Black Buddha were reputed to 
  have driven a tribe or group of cannibals out of the 
  mountains. These cannibals were likely either the 
  Tcho-Tcho tribe,3 or devotees of a radical sect of 
  the Dzogschen school of Buddhism.4 
  • 
  Baron Ungern von Sternberg, an eccentric Russian 
  military officer, mystic and warlord, visited the 
  Plateau to construct the Wall of Pain. The Bloody 
  Baron fought on the pro-monarchist side of the 
  Russian civil war, and believed that he was destined 
  to become a new Genghis Khan, who would 
  lead an army of Mongolian warriors to conquer 
  Eurasia and purge the land of Bolsheviks and other 
  traitors. As part of his crusade, he allied himself 
  with the Bogd Khan, the eighth Bodg Gegen. The 
  Bogd Khan was the third most senior lama in the 
  Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and the de 
  facto ruler of Northern Mongolia. The Baron won 
  the Bogd Khan’s support and trust by promising to 
  end the nightmarish visions and dreams sent from 
  the Pyramid. 
  • 
  The OGPU (the precursor agency to the KGB) 
  had a long-standing interest in the Plateau. Gleb 
  Ivanovich Bokii – secret policeman, cryptographer 
  and Rosicrucian – took over the OGPU’s Spetsotdel 
  department in 1923. That included 7th Section 
  (which later became the Thirteenth Directorate 
  after another series of Stalinist purges and 
  reorganisations). He tried to dispatch an official 
  expedition to Tibet in 1925, but elements in the 
  OGPU’s Foreign Intelligence section blocked him 
  (and accused him of drinking blood, to boot). He 
  tried to do an end run around Foreign Intelligence 
  by sending Yakov Blumkin to sneak into Tibet. 
  Given Blumkin next shows up in Sternberg’s old 
  stronghold at Dauria, we believe he made it to the 
  Plateau and learned about the Wall of Pain. 
  l a u n d r y  e x p e d i t i o n s
  Following TEAPOT’s initial debriefing in 1945, the 
  Laundry became aware of the danger posed by the 
  Sleeper. Two expeditions in Tibet failed to locate any 
  ‘thin places’ that crossed over to the Plateau, and a 
  third expedition to Antarctica was cancelled due to 
  more pressing business elsewhere. It was not until 1961 
  that the Laundry mounted a successful expedition to 
  the Plateau. 
  3. An isolated ethic group in Myanmar, whose myths and legends demonstrate previous close contact with alien entities.
  4. Some Dzongchen sects were reputed to ritually consume the bodies of dead masters, as a portion of their enlightenment was passed on 
  through eating their flesh.
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  36
  The First Expedition reached the Plateau via the 
  Gate on Bogd Uhl Mountain in Mongolia. On arrival, 
  it conducted a cartographic survey of the Plateau, 
  although it did not dare to cross the Wall of Pain. Two 
  men died of exposure on the Plateau, and another three 
  perished or went mad on the return journey. Still, the 
  expedition confirmed that the Wall was still in place.
  The Second Expedition (1965) used an artificial Gate 
  opened in the basement of the University of Manchester 
  using the Atlas-3 mainframe, in one of the first large 
  scale invocations using computational demonology. 
  The Second Expedition took more scientific equipment 
  with it, and were able to measure thaumic flux and 
  radiation on the Plateau, as well as being able to 
  conduct a closer examination of the Wall of Pain. 
  The disastrous Third Expedition (1966) attempted 
  to penetrate the Wall of Pain to reach the Pyramid. 
  Arcana Analysis believed that it was possible to fool the 
  watchers using a thanothic manipulation; this proved 
  to be incorrect, and the entire expedition was killed. 
  Their bodies are still visible on the south-east approach 
  to the Pyramid. 
  The Fourth Expedition (1968), mounted with the 
  assistance of TEAPOT, was the only expedition to cross 
  the Wall. The means used to do so are classified WIDOW 
  GAMBIT and are unlikely to be used again. Six members 
  of the Fourth Expedition successfully crossed the Wall 
  of Pain and spent 14 hours on and around the Pyramid 
  of the Sleeper. The crossing was a one-way mission, 
  but their observations and samples were placed in 
  a glider and flown off the Pyramid to be collected by 
  the support team on the far side. Of the six officers 
  who crossed over, four committed suicide (two on the 
  Rapture Walk, two using their cyanide tablets), one was 
  shot when he attempted to open the Sleeper’s Tomb, 
  and the last member vanished and is presumed to be 
  dead somewhere inside the Temple.
  Following the Fourth Expedition, Squadron 666 took 
  over the duty of monitoring the Pyramid.
  The Fifth Expedition (1984) conducted a search of the 
  Plateau following the sighting of six intruders. It found 
  footprints leading up to the Wall, but there were no 
  signs of damage or any other tampering. Two members 
  of the team returned to the Gate to contact mission 
  control and request use of WIDOW GAMBIT. However, 
  while waiting for clearance, the remaining team saw a 
  bright light flash from inside the temple, followed by 
  ‘an inhuman scream.’ Moments later, they received a 
  radio transmission informing them that everyone in the 
  Temple had perished. 
  Mission control denied the use of WIDOW GAMBIT, and 
  there were no further transmissions or unusual activity 
  at the Temple.
  The Sixth and final Expedition (1987) planned to rappel 
  down the side of the Plateau and explore a nearby 
  structure nicknamed ‘The Monastery.’ A base camp 
  was established at the edge of the Plateau, while 
  the advance team descended to the plains below. 
  They crossed six kilometres of broken terrain without 
  incident before contact was abruptly cut off by a 
  sudden dust storm. When visibility cleared, there was 
  - - - - - - - -  t r a n s m i s s i o n  t r a n s c r i P t  - - - - - - - -
  Classified CODICIL BLACK SKULL - 8/9/84  
   
   
   
   
          0519 hours.
  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  SMITH: Bravo, any sign?
  BRAVO: Not yet, sir. Doorway is still clear.
  SMITH: All right, let’s assume that we’re going 
  to do this. Bravo, you’ll escort REDACTED when – 
  UNKNOWN VOICE: ... dead...
  SMITH: Say again. 
  UNKNOWN VOICE: ... please... I can hear the 
  flute... 
  SMITH: Who is this?
  UNKNOWN VOICE: We looked beneath his mask... I 
  saw... all dead... 
  SMITH: Are you on the Pyramid? Who are you?
  UNKNOWN VOICE: You fool... we’re all dead...
  JACOBSEN: I think it’s coming from up there, 
  sir. Short range.
  SMITH: Who are you? Identify yourself! Where are 
  you?
  SMITH: Identify yourself!
  SMITH: Anybody see them?
  SMITH: Anything?
  ---END---
  
  37
  5. Forty-three missions were scrubbed due to equipment failure or human error, and nine missions failed due to crashes, dust storms or 
  other environmental conditions. In each case, 666 Squadron was able to fly a second mission within 72 hours to maintain the watch.
  no sign of the advance team. No radio transmissions or 
  other signals were received, suggesting that whatever 
  happened to them happened very quickly.
  S q u a D R O N  6 6 6
  The high casualty rate of ground expeditions onto 
  the Plateau, coupled with the desire to develop more 
  effective countermeasures against the Sleeper, led to 
  the re-tasking of Squadron No. 666 with the mission 
  of conducting regular reconnaissance overflights of 
  the Dead Plateau. Squadron No. 666 was an Army Air 
  Corps Air Observation Post unit up until 1964, when it 
  was retrained to conduct offworld operations. The first 
  flight of the new 666 Squadron took place in 1968, and 
  it has successfully completed one recon flight every 
  week since then from their base at RAF Cosford.5
  Initially, Squadron 666 flew English Electric Canberras, 
  refitted with optics and thaumaturgy equipment in 
  addition to their payload of WE.177 tactical nuclear 
  weapons. The Canberras were escorted on their flights 
  by BAC Lightnings. 
  After 1978, the Squadron switched to using four 
  Concorde refitted for occult reconnaissance and nuclear 
  strike capability, while Tornado F3s (and, latterly, 
  Eurofighters) gradually replaced the Lightnings in 
  performing escort duty. 
  Squadron 666 currently operates a stable of four MQ-
  9ORS Reapers to provide unmanned observations of 
  the Pyramid.
  M a n n e d  F l i g h t s
  Currently, there are no manned flights to the Plateau, 
  and all Concorde aircraft are undergoing extensive 
  maintenance and exorcism. However, due to the 
  unreliability of the Reaper drones when operating on 
  the far side, the decision has been made to reactivate 
  CODICIL BLACK SKULL manned flights as soon as 
  possible. 
  Under standard conditions, flights take off at night from 
  RAF Cosford and fly west over the Atlantic, refuelling 
  from a VC10 tanker based at RAF St. Athan in Wales. 
  The loadmaster on board then opens a Class Three gate 
  big enough for the lead aircraft plus escorts.
  Gate spells targeting the Sleeper’s world are unreliable. 
  The Plateau itself is remarkably easy to get to. The 
  barriers between realities are thin there; it almost 
  seems to draw travellers towards it. However, opening 
  a Gate away from or above the Plateau is much more 
  problematic. The far end of the Gate usually opens 
  at an altitude of 2,000 metres within 50 kilometres 
  of the Plateau, but considerable variation has been 
  observed. Some flights narrowly avoided crashing into 
  the Plateau itself; other flights arrived more than 200 
  kilometres off course and had to reorient themselves 
  before commencing their scheduled overflight.
  Standard watch protocol consists of flying three circuits 
  of a racetrack pattern over the Plateau, using a rock 
  formation nicknamed Bovington as a point of reference. 
  Flying directly over the Pyramid itself or crossing 
  the Wall of Pain is not permitted. During each pass, 
  Concorde’s crew capture images using a combination of 
  conventional aerial photography, FLIR, thamatography 
  and Raytheon SAR/MTI dual mode radar. Up until 2001, 
  flights also used a Tillinghast/SCRY4 Kirlian camera, 
  but the use of this instrument has been discontinued 
  except in emergencies due to its deleterious effects on 
  airframe and crew. All missions now carry air-launched 
  GABLE WINDOW pods as an alternative to Tillinghast 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  38
  6. The National Imagery Exploitation Centre; formerly the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre based at RAF Medmenham (home, 
  not co-incidentally, of Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club and the Mad Monks.) 
  7. In the event that one of the White Elephants is unavailable, a Sentinel R1 equipped with Gate-opening technology can open the way for 
  a scrambled Eurofighter with a hot payload.
  fields. Concorde flights also gather atmospheric data 
  and photograph the sky or stars above the Plateau. The 
  escort planes carry dust collection pods, and fly lower 
  over the Plateau 
  Once the recon mission is complete, a second Gate 
  is opened, and the flight returns to base. There, both 
  crew and aircraft are exorcised. The Plateau is highly 
  contaminated with necromantic energy. Squadron 666 
  crew are rotated regularly, and no member is allowed 
  to log more than 200 hours on the other side. 
  D r o n e  F l i g h t s
  As of 2009, Squadron 666 switched to flying Reaper 
  drones instead of sending manned flights into the Dead 
  Plateau. These drones are launched from RAF Cosford 
  and escorted by a recon aircraft (usually a Sentinel 
  R1) equipped with a Gate generator. The drones fly 
  through the Gate to the target world, while a second 
  smaller Gate opens at the Remote Operations Centre 
  at Winterbourne Gunner. Telemetry is sent through 
  this second Gate via a sympathetic link, allowing group 
  operators to control the drones even when the primary 
  (physical) Gate closes. 
  The Sentinel circles until the Reaper flight completes its 
  mission, then opens a second Class 3 gate to retrieve 
  the drones. The intent of the switch to drones was to 
  shield human operators from the deleterious effects of 
  the Plateau.
  Drone flights were suspended in 2010 following multiple 
  mission failures. The sympathetic Gate link worked 
  during test flights, but proved unreliable during field 
  operations. Two drones failed to return to the exit Gate, 
  and a third was destroyed in flight by an unidentified 
  flying monster. 
  P o s t - M i s s i o n  a n a l y s i s
  Recon data from BLACK CODICIL flights is analysed 
  between each mission. Images from previous flights are 
  compared for changes, allowing the quick identification 
  of any new features or movement. Concorde’s crew 
  complete a quick analysis while in flight; if they detect 
  anything significant, then they flash a warning to the 
  backup flight (see Threat Response). Between missions, 
  staff at JARIC6 at RAF Brampton perform more detailed 
  analysis of all readings and photographs.
  T h r e a t  R e s p o n s e
  One Concorde7 is always kept in readiness. Should 
  analysis of images detect a threat, this aircraft can be 
  dispatched to the Plateau to deal with the threat. (If an 
  aircraft spots a potential threat during a reconnaissance 
  flight, its orders are to return to our reality via a Gate, 
  radio for authorization to engage, and then return to 
  the Dead Plateau.) The threat response ladder for 
  BLACK CODICIL is a short one, as no interference with 
  the Pyramid can be permitted. 
  •	
  Rung	 One: Intervention. A unit of paratroopers 
  and support staff airdrop in (or Gate in) and secure 
  the Plateau and the Wall of Pain. Likely scenario: 
  cultists attempt to deconstruct the Wall of Pain.
  •	
  Rung	 Two: Conventional Strike.  The escort 
  aircraft launch a precision strike on the threat 
  using Brimstone air-to-ground missiles. Likely 
  scenario: summoned horror attempts to roll over 
  Wall of Pain.
  •	
  Rung	 Three: Nuclear Strike. Concorde drops 
  WE.177 tactical nuclear device. Likely scenario: 
  Sleeper awakens.
  •	
  Rung	 Four:	 	 REDACTED . Likely scenario 
  REDACTED 
  S u p p o r t
  Squadron 666 can provide CAS (Close Air Support) to 
  teams operating on the Plateau. While this capability 
  has not previously been employed, all Squadron 666 
  pilots are trained in close air support when directed by a 
  qualified FAC (Forward Air Controller). Teams operating 
  on the Plateau can employ laser targeting equipment 
  to direct bombing runs or missiles onto hostile targets. 
  Due to the difficulty of reaching the Plateau and the 
  notoriously unreliable communications in the area, 
  CAS is limited to a single bombing run under most 
  circumstances.
  a f t e r w o r d
  The Watch on the Dead Plateau is the single most 
  important duty you will ever undertake. If someone 
  succeeds in waking the Sleeper, they start a chain of 
  events that ends in the destruction of our world. We 
  must be prepared to make any sacrifice in order to 
  prevent this catastrophe. Our mission is nothing less 
  than the safety of the human race.
  
  39
  The Plateau of  the Sleeper
  This place looks well and truly dead at first sight. I take three steps 
  after Persephone and nearly go arse over tit, for with each pace I 
  land too late, too far away. Lower gravity than Earth, but not too 
  low—this planet still has a breathable atmosphere, which suggests 
  something is still putting oxygen into it. Above me the sky is dark, 
  save for a broad sash of  bluish glowing dust that crosses the up-
  turned bowl of  the heavens—and a sun, angry and red-eyed and 
  much too small. It’s daytime and the milky way (or what passes for 
  the ecliptic of  the local galaxy) is visible and the ground underfoot 
  is dry, uneven grit and stone slabs. Mountains rise in the distance, 
  beyond a fencelike series of  isolated lumpy posts.
  - The Apocalypse Codex
  You have dreamed of this place. Everyone has. If you’re 
  lucky, you forgot the dream upon waking, and it left only a 
  lingering disquiet. 
  Not everyone is so lucky. Not everyone wakes up.
  The Sleeper waits in a temple atop a Pyramid on a distant 
  world. It is not dead, but lies in not-quite-eternal slumber, 
  waiting for the strange eons to come again when the walls 
  of reality become so thin it can tear them down and let its 
  masters return to the universe they once ruled. That cold, 
  lonely Plateau is not the only battleground in the Laundry’s 
  struggle against the coming apocalypse, but it’s one of the 
  most likely flashpoints. The end of the world is closer there.
  In your Laundry Files campaign, the Dead Plateau (or 
  something like it) can work as an Endgame Condition.
  Endgames 
  “The Sleeper. You’re not saying it’s N’yar lath-Hotep itself?”
  “No, nothing that powerful: there is a hierarchy of  horrors here, a 
  ladder that must be climbed. But the thing in the pyramid can set 
  in motion a chain of  events that will ultimately open the doors of  
  uncreation. To release it, they would best wait for the conjunction 
  of  chance: but it is in the nature of  mortal cultists that they are 
  impatient.”
  - The Fuller Memorandum
  Roleplaying games have an interesting problem with risk. On 
  the one hand, the chance of failure makes things interesting. 
  If there’s no chance of losing, then the players’ decisions 
  don’t mean as much, and there’s no point in rolling dice. 
  Survival on the Plateau
  “One of the tools used by the monks was a preta, a hungry ghost: a body in its custody could 
  function on the Sleeper’s Plateau far more effectively than any of Sternberg’s men, who had 
  a tendency to die or go mad after only a few hours.”
  - The Fuller Memorandum
  The Plateau’s a bad place, for very, very large values of bad. Player characters sent to the 
  Plateau face numerous hazards.
  Cold: Anyone on the Plateau must roll Endurance once per day; failure means that the character 
  loses 1d6 Hit Points.
  Thin Air: The lack of oxygen means that characters who exert themselves for more than a 
  few minutes on the Plateau must make Endurance rolls; failure means the character feels 
  lightheaded and becomes Fatigued.
  Sanity: Those who walk in the shadow of the Sleeper often go mad. Characters lose 1d3/1d6 
  SAN every three hours while on the Plateau, in addition to any other SAN losses caused by 
  encounters or uncanny experiences.
  Health: The Plateau drains the life force from those who walk on it. Characters lose 1d6 
  Hit Points every three hours spent on it. Warded characters can count their ward as armour 
  against this roll (so, if you’re wearing a Class 2 ward, you lose 1d6-2 Hit Points). 
  Characters that perish from this life-draining effect just fall dead where they stand, with 
  no marks or symptoms. 
  Gear: Bad luck haunts the Plateau. The Gamemaster should call for Luck rolls at especially 
  inconvenient moments to determine whether or not key pieces of gear succumb to the increased 
  entropy of the Sleeper’s domain. Such items must be replaced or repaired.
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  40
  On the other, failure has to be mitigated, especially early in a 
  campaign. It’s frustrating to have your character killed in the 
  very first fight, and it’s even worse if you accidentally end 
  the world (and, more importantly, the campaign) by failing 
  in your very first adventure. That’s not an issue in novels and 
  other fiction. There, the writer can decide whether or not 
  a character succeeds. Roleplaying games bring interactivity 
  and unpredictability to the story; it’s their blessing and also 
  their curse. Things can and do go horribly wrong.
  The Gamemaster should build up the stakes slowly, so early 
  missions revolve around minor threats, like shoggoths in 
  the sewers and clueless cultists, leading to bigger bad guys 
  in later games, once the players are familiar enough with the 
  setting and the rules and effective tactics to deal with them. 
  If the player characters do screw up, then the Gamemaster 
  can mitigate that failure. (“If you succeed, then you stopped 
  a swarm of shoggoths from eating Wales. If you fail, then 
  HMS York engages in a ‘training exercise’ off the coast 
  that happens to involve blowing up a large chunk of the 
  seashore”).
  If Bob were a player character, then his early missions 
  were mostly small-scale affairs (‘investigate concrete cows 
  in Milton Keynes,’ ‘go check up on the conditions in St. 
  Hildas,’ ‘look for occult secrets in Neverwinter Nights 2’). 
  It could be argued that the ending of The Jennifer Morgue 
  is an example of the Gamemaster interceding to pull the 
  player character’s bacon out of the fire when he screws up.
  “The cat. You said it was the enemy. You didn’t say it was occupied 
  by the mind of  that thing.” She points up at the ceiling, where the 
  chthonic warrior is definitely twitching and writhing. I stare. 
  “Uh, well, I meant – “
  “And you thought killing it would improve matters?”
  “Yes?”
  “One of  the bole-like knots in the warrior’s hide is growing larger. 
  Then it opens, revealing an eye the size of  a truck tire. It stares 
  right back at me.”
  - The Jennifer Morgue.
  Bob’s Fumble on a Knowledge (Cccult) roll is followed 
  shortly by the GM stepping in to contain the situation.
  “Don’t worry about the eldritch horror, we’ve a plan for this 
  contingency – as soon as we’ve evac’d we’ll just pop a brace of  
  Storm Shadows on his ass and send him right back down where 
  he belongs.”
  Ultimately, though, the Gamemaster has to take the 
  kid gloves off. The Laundry exists in the shadow of 
  Armageddon, and that apocalypse is delayed or hastened 
  by the actions of the player characters. Having everything 
  depend on one dice roll or even one adventure is a bad idea 
  – it puts too much up to chance and can leave the players 
  feeling cheated if they lose everything because of one bad 
  call or one bad roll. The solution is to establish an Endgame 
  Condition for your campaign.
  An Endgame Condition is a big red button that the bad 
  guys have to press. Getting into position to press the big 
  red button isn’t easy, and requires a lot of resources and 
  cunning, but if the bad guys ever manage it, it changes the 
  game completely. The more complicated it is to get there, 
  the more secrets and occult revelations you layer around it, 
  the better that final struggle becomes.
  In the Laundry Files novels, the Sleeper in the Pyramid 
  is an Endgame Condition. Wake the Sleeper, and CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN kicks off. 
  Twice, Bob’s run into cults that want to get to the Sleeper 
  and press the button. In both cases, getting into position 
  requires overcoming the same obstacles, but the two cults 
  use different tactics.
  Obstacle
  Black Brotherhood
  Golden Promise
  The Wall 
  of Pain
  Gaining control of 
  TEAPOT, who knows 
  how to deconstruct 
  the fence.
  Opening a Gate 
  on the far side 
  of the Wall and 
  completing their 
  ritual before the 
  dead notice them.
  Avoiding 
  Detection
  Infiltrating the 
  Laundry and planting 
  double agents on the 
  very committee tasked 
  with watching for 
  threats to the Pyramid.
  Drop a giant 
  snowstorm/occult 
  occlusion spell on 
  Colorado to block 
  the Black Chamber.
  Waking 
  the 
  Sleeper
  Contact the Sleeper 
  via TEAPOT, 
  powering the spell 
  using the necromantic 
  energy of the 
  London Necropolis.
  Enact the ritual 
  from the Book of 
  Enoch, including 
  two members with 
  the blood of the 
  elect.
  
  41
  Different cults might use different tactics, or revise their 
  strategies when thwarted. The Black Brotherhood might 
  go looking for the Burdowkovskii scroll to call up its own 
  Eater of Souls, so the characters have to stop it stealing the 
  Tibetan scroll from the archives of the Nameless Bureau. 
  The Golden Promise may have lost its Mother-of-Hosts, 
  but it has demonstrated the ability and the willingness to use 
  alien horrors to further its plans – maybe it could go right to 
  the primal source this time, and whistle up a Mi-Go surgeon 
  to splice Deep Ones and human together and breed more 
  of the Elect. 
  Adding third parties and unexpected enemies – or allies 
  – makes the race for the Endgame Condition more 
  unpredictable. In The Fuller Memorandum, Nikolai Panin 
  and the Thirteenth Directorate want to ensure the safety 
  of TEAPOT and to stop the cult, but they’ve also got their 
  own parallel agenda. 
  In The Apocalypse Codex (and, for that matter, The Jennifer 
  Morgue), the Black Chamber lurked in the background, 
  using the cultists to do the heavy lifting before the Nazgul 
  swoop in with taloned hands and grab the godlike entity. 
  The Laundry Files draws inspirations from spy thrillers, and 
  the best spy thrillers exist on the threshold of Armageddon. 
  The Plateau is Bob Howard’s rain-slick Berlin street, his 
  moving dots on a radar screen. 
  The Plateau & Other Places
  Games that track close to the novels can use the Dead 
  Plateau and the Pyramid of the Sleeper, but there are other 
  options, other potential endgames. If Leng’s off the table, 
  Lovecraft offers other secret places – none of them are the 
  end of the world, but you can see it from there.
  Look for places and concepts that offer lots of connections, 
  especially ones that branch off into the febrile grounds of 
  the occult, ancient myths, Lovecraftiana, nineteenth and 
  twentieth century spying, and modern day military activity 
  and espionage. You’ll find eerie correspondences as soon as 
  you scratch the surface.
  • 
  Great Cthulhu, he of the squiddy face and the weight 
  issues, inspirer of plush toys and slippers, probably 
  isn’t sleeping at the bottom of the Pacific, but there 
  could be a sunken outpost down there on the ocean 
  floor, an abyssal zone too wet for the Cthonians to 
  dare, shunned by the Deep Ones, dead yet dreaming. 
  If the bad guys get down there with a submarine, 
  or convince DEEP SEVEN to trigger a cataclysmic 
  earthquake that brings some of the landmass to the 
  surface, or find a way to remotely channel many 
  megadeaths worth of necromantic energy down to a 
  stone door that’s oddly non-Euclidian, then they can 
  rotate R’lyeh out of hyperspace and into congruence 
  with our reality. Suddenly, there’ll be an Australia-sized 
  land mass right in the middle of the Pacific, crammed 
  with alien horrors and dread gods who last looked 
  upon Earth three hundred million years ago.
  • 
  What lies frozen under the ice in Antarctica? What 
  secrets did everyone’s favourite star-headed crinoids 
  leave buried? What were the Nazis looking for in 
  New Swabia, and what did the Black Chamber 
  find during Operations HIGHJUMP and DEEP 
  FREEZE? Maybe the Elder Things were wiped out by 
  a previous conjunction just like CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN, but in the fading days of their civilisation, 
  they discovered a way to control the dimensional 
  permeability, to move the very stars from rightness. 
  Maybe this secret could not stop the conjunction from 
  happening, but could spare humanity from the worst 
  of it – or, in the hands of a cult, throw the Gates open 
  wide.
  • 
  Lovecraft wrote of a Nameless City, located somewhere 
  near fabled Iram of the Pillars in the Arabian desert. 
  (Iram, “which yet, after the annihilation of  its tenants, 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  42
  remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but 
  occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-
  favoured traveller” – which sounds strongly like a parallel 
  world accessible via a thin place). This ancient city was 
  inhabited by horrific reptile-men and concealed some 
  awful secret. From there, you can tie in large chunks of 
  the Cold War and the War on Terror – oil was just the 
  cover for something worse.
  • 
  OGRE REALITY: Maybe Bob was wrong – maybe 
  that parallel universe where the Wannsee Invocation 
  succeeded and called up an Ice Giant is still extant. You 
  could bring back the villains from The Atrocity Archives, 
  because who doesn’t love alternate-reality Nazis 
  possessing people on behalf of their information-
  eating god? 
  Of course, the Object of Desire for the cultists doesn’t 
  have to be a physical location. It could be a goal that can be 
  accomplished anywhere.
  • 
  Lovecraft’s own take on CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN is hidden in The Dunwich Horror. “They from 
  the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can 
  clear off  the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, 
  so I shall have to learn all the angles of  the planes and all the 
  formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside 
  will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. 
  That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a 
  little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of  
  Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the 
  Hill. The other face may wear off  some. I wonder how I shall 
  look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings 
  on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be 
  transfigured, there being much of  outside to work on.” 
  If those from outside need a human crossbreed, like 
  Wilbur Whateley or his brother, then the goal of an 
  apocalyptic cult might be creating a replacement 
  hybrid. Back in old Wizard Whateley’s day, there weren’t 
  any agencies monitoring IVF clinics or scanning the 
  internet for references to Sentinel Hill. The Laundry 
  and the Black Chamber watch for any attempts to 
  recreate the Dunwich Horror – and even if a cult did 
  succeed, it’s hard to hide such a hybrid as it grows to 
  monstrous maturity.
  • 
  Human consciousness is a complex structure of 
  information, and randomising that information (aka 
  death) creates ripples in the platonic realm. Killing lots 
  of people in a ritual fashion was at the core of the 
  Nazi’s Wannsee Invocation, not to mention many other 
  nasty occult rituals. Sacrificial murder is undeniably 
  potent, and a great way to call up alien horrors, but 
  it requires both thaumaturgical expertise and multiple 
  murders. Mass death works almost as well, assuming 
  you don’t mind which brain-sucker homes in on the 
  pulse of necromantic energy, and is actually easier to 
  conceal. 
  You don’t need to stab your virgin sacrifice with a 
  silver knife on an altar of obsidian on Walpurgisnacht 
  – you just murder a few million people in a short 
  period. The aim of the bad guys might be to cause 
  multiple megadeaths, say by dropping a nuclear bomb 
  on Istanbul or releasing a lethal bioweapon in Times 
  Square. The bigger the disaster, the more likely that 
  one of their monstrous patrons will sense it or take 
  advantage of it.
  • 
  There are other ways to call the Great Old Ones back 
  down to Earth. Worship on its own doesn’t do much 
  for them, but there are certain memetic patterns that 
  can hijack the runtime of the human brain and make 
  it easier for Them to break through. If the cultists can 
  spread these memes to enough people, they can lower 
  the permittivity of free space and let the horrors inside. 
  Doing so requires either massive social engineering – 
  you need to get your memetic pattern up there with 
  Christianity or Coca-Cola – or else optimise your 
  software (the pattern) or hardware (brain comma 
  human) so you can accomplish more with less. Tell 
  me, have you seen the Yellow Sign? Better yet, can you 
  look at this Yellow Sign while we pump you full of 
  psychoactive drugs?
  • 
  If there was a fast-forward button for CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN, don’t you think that the 
  Laundry or some other agency would have grabbed it 
  long ago. In this scenario, there’s a relic or artefact that 
  can trigger the end of the world, and it’s sitting in a 
  secure vault. 
  Maybe the Black Chamber has Randolph Carter’s 
  Silver Key locked away deep under the Ranch, or 
  the Laundry have the Moon-Lens hidden in a special 
  lightless facility within TURNSTILE. The cultists plot 
  to recover this relic from the authorities and use it to 
  trigger the end of the world. Why hasn’t the Laundry 
  destroyed this artefact yet? That’s for your players to 
  discover!
  • 
  When the conjunction hits, groups like the Laundry 
  are going to be humanity’s shield against extinction. 
  All the national occult security agencies have plans to 
  protect their country when the tentacles go up – but 
  what happens if one of those agencies gets taken 
  
  43
  over by cultists? The Laundry can’t keep the United 
  Kingdom safe if the French get subverted by the Black 
  Brotherhood and things squirm across the English 
  Channel through the Channel Tunnel…
  Seeding the Threat
  Once you’ve got your Big Red Button, the next step is to 
  seed the threat in your campaign. Bob didn’t learn about the 
  Sleeper on Day 1 of his career in the Laundry, but there were 
  hints of the horrors to come even back then. Angleton’s 
  inhumanity and the threat of CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN are present even in The Concrete Jungle. The 
  seeds of the threat should always be presented as oblique 
  references, as footnotes, as asides. Have the characters spot 
  veiled references in old classified documents, have older 
  spies mutter darkly about that bother in Ceylon, mention a 
  botched operation in Singapore, and have a crazy cultist rant 
  about the God of Still Waters. 
  Spread your seeds out across adventures as you introduce 
  the threat gradually. For example, Bob learns about the 
  White Elephants of Squadron 666 long before he finds 
  out about the Wall of Pain. Drop nuggets of disassociated 
  information into your games, so when the players finally 
  draw the connections and realise what’s really going on, it 
  feels like a natural capstone to the game so far.
  Let’s say you’ve got the Yog-Sothoth gambit as your Endgame 
  Condition – if a half-human, half-exonome hybrid casts the 
  right spell, it’ll bring the stars to rightness. You might kick off 
  this campaign with A Footnote, the adventure on page 251 of 
  the Laundry Files rulebook). It’s a simple little affair, but it seeds 
  the idea of artificially creating hybrids. A few adventures later, 
  you could send the characters to obtain a grimoire from an 
  occult book dealer, where they’re chased by agents of a rival 
  cult. There’s no obvious connection between the two, until 
  on a third adventure they start looking into the awful truth 
  behind the myths of Leda and the swan… and find out that 
  certain exonomes plan to use human hybrids as purchase on 
  the fabric of our reality. By the time the characters are chasing 
  invisible monsters through the streets of London, it will feel 
  like a suitable epic turning point – or finale – to the campaign.
  Defences & Requirements
  Ending the world should never be easy. It’s much more 
  impressive and intimidating for the players to see the bad 
  guys overcome tremendous obstacles and actually work to 
  make their plans come to fruition than when they do it by 
  Gamesmaster fiat. Building the opposition’s credibility with 
  the players is key to making the Endgame Condition feel 
  suitably weighty.
  Therefore, put yourself in Angleton’s oddly cold shoes. You 
  know there’s this threat out there, this method for bringing 
  about the End Times prematurely. You want to stop it, 
  and you’ve had eighty years and the full resources of the 
  Laundry with which to do so. Take some time to think 
  about how the Laundry (or other, similar groups) would 
  try to prevent anyone pressing the Big Red Button. For the 
  Pyramid, there’s the watch on the Dead Plateau and the Wall 
  of Pain. What other countermeasures could be reasonably 
  employed?
  • 
  Obtaining all copies of a grimoire, or planting fake 
  versions of the grimoire in the occult underground.
  • 
  Maintaining a military cordon around a ritual site.
  • 
  Infiltrating agents into threatening cults.
  • 
  Running false flag and honey pot operations.
  If any preparation would make the Endgame Condition 
  unreachable, then come up with a reason why the Laundry 
  can’t do that. For example, the Laundry can’t station troops 
  to guard the Dead Plateau because people go mad and 
  die there with only a few hours of exposure. Maybe the 
  Laundry can’t destroy every copy of a particular grimoire 
  because there are copies in the archives of the Thirteenth 
  Directorate, and they can’t drop a nuke on the sunken 
  continent in the Pacific because it would anger BLUE 
  HADES. 
  Make a list of what needs to be accomplished to 
  bring about the Endgame, come up with existing 
  countermeasures for each of them, and then poke holes 
  in those countermeasures. So, if the bad guys need to use 
  the Silver Key to establish contact with Yog-Sothoth, and 
  to do that safely they need a translation of an arabesqued 
  parchment found with the key. 
  The Black Chamber has the key locked away (it doesn’t 
  want to destroy the key because it intends to use it), 
  the Laundry’s been running Professor Higgins, the best 
  expert in the world on Tsath-Yo as an agent since 1974, 
  and there’s an oneiromantic strike team ready to deploy if 
  anyone gets too close to Yog-Sothoth’s throne room. 
  Let the players know the list of requirements, so they’re 
  not operating completely in the dark, but reveal both the 
  Laundry’s preparations and the opposition’s plans slowly 
  over the course of the game. The players need enough 
  information to know what’s at stake – if Bob was never 
  briefed about the Pyramid of the Sleeper, then his struggles 
  with the cults would feel oddly abstract, as he wouldn’t 
  know what the enemy hoped to achieve. 
  ThE PLATEAU Of ThE SLEEPER
  The Plateau of the Sleeper
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  44
  Feint & Counterfeint
  Now that you’ve set up this intricate web of defences, 
  countermeasures and stratagems, it’s time to put the whole 
  thing into motion. The opposition try to accomplish one 
  of their requirements for bringing about the Endgame. The 
  countermeasures go into effect – but the bad guys have a 
  way to get around them. Now, it’s up to the player characters 
  to step in and save the day.
  Going back to the example of the Silver Key, the opposition 
  contacts Professor Higgins and demands that he translates 
  the scroll. As per his instructions, he informs the Laundry 
  that the enemy has made contact, but before he can give 
  them a fake translation, the opposition murder him and 
  capture his soul in a trap. The characters have to rescue a 
  dead man before he translates the scroll for the cult. 
  If the characters succeed, then the opposition can try 
  again with a new scheme, or look for a way to bypass that 
  requirement. If Higgins won’t translate the scroll, then 
  maybe they can steal the Laundry’s translation, or maybe 
  a Laundry agent turns traitor and gives the translation to 
  the cult. 
  And if the characters fail? Then they’ve lost one battle, and 
  are one step closer to Armageddon, but the war’s not over 
  yet.
  Pressing the Big Red Button
  Keep hammering at a wall, and you’ll break through in the 
  end. When the player characters win, all they accomplish 
  is keeping the opposition stalemated. When the opposition 
  win, they get closer to Endgame, and eventually they’ll be 
  in a position to press that button. Months of preparation 
  and intrigue, of move and countermove have led up to this 
  moment. 
  Everything now depends on the actions of the player 
  characters. If they can come up with a way to stop the 
  opposition at the moment of triumph, then the enemy’s 
  plans are foiled forever. The characters have successfully 
  avoided the premature arrival of CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN. You can either start again with another cycle 
  of seeding threats, or you can have the End Times arrive 
  ‘naturally’ in a few years (but the characters have bought 
  humanity several more vital years in which to prepare for 
  the onslaught). 
  If the characters fail, then don’t save the day with any deus 
  ex machina salvations and don’t pull your punches. Move 
  into the opening stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN 
  (see The Phoney War, page 82).  
  
  45
  Cymothea Exilis
  (Eater of Tongues)
  Cymothea Exigua is one of the weirder parasites found 
  in nature. It’s a species of parasitic aquatic louse, 
  believed to be native to the waters off California. 
  The louse feeds by swimming into the gills of a 
  fish and making its way to the mouth. There, it 
  digs into the base of the fish’s tongue, cutting 
  off the blood supply. Deprived of blood, the tongue 
  atrophies and dies, and the louse attaches itself 
  to the muscles and arteries that once supported the 
  tongue. In effect, the louse becomes a replacement 
  tongue for the fish (or, to put it another way, the 
  fish becomes a mobile life support system for the 
  tongue-eating louse).
   
  There is a high correlation between 
  cymothea exigua swarms and the location of BLUE 
  HADES underwater colonies. Cymothea exigua 
  is most often located off California, where 
  there is a known colony off Baja California, 
  but New England fishing records from the 1900s 
  show that boats fishing near Innsmouth used to 
  find tongue-eaten fish, and there’s a cold-
  water breed called cymothea caledonia that’s 
  sometimes found in cod brought up from Witch’s Hole.1 
   
  The truly dangerous form of the louse, cymothea exilis, is a larger and magically potent 
  form of the parasite. Research has yet to determine whether these creatures are exonomes (in which 
  case the common cymothea exigua is presumably a degenerate descendant of the true species) or 
  autonomes (suggesting that exilis was bred from exigua, presumably through BLUE HADES intercession). 
  ----- BIoLogy ------
  A ‘naked’ exilis specimen is a pale, soft-shelled crustacean measuring six to ten centimetres in 
  length. It has seven pairs of legs, although the three rear pairs are used primarily for swimming 
  and atrophy when the louse takes a host. It regrows these legs prior to leaving an exhausted host. 
   
  Like its smaller cousin, cymothea exilis cuts off the blood supply to the human tongue and 
  attaches itself to the roots of the glossus muscles, the lingual artery and the hypoglossal nerve. 
  Unlike its cousin, exilis consumes the tongue for sustenance. It excretes a thick brown fluid that 
  the host must spit from the mouth to avoid choking. C. exilis does not connect to the tonsillar 
  branch of the facial artery or to the ascending pharyngeal artery, so the host bleeds into the 
  mouth for up to three hours after the parasite latches on. 
   
  once attached, c. exilis consumes most of the mind of the host, leaving only a shell of 
  a personality. The host can appear to be human, and can still speak normally, but it exists only 
  to serve the parasite. The parasite acts as the host’s tongue; other than a slight slurring, the 
  host’s speech is unaffected. The parasite can attract new hosts by means of psychic compulsion (see 
  below), but normally, an infected host is employed to capture and prepare new victims. 
  Monsters
  MONSTERS
  Monsters
  1. Pursuant to HR Directive 94532/c, fishing within the Dunwich Exclusion Zone is strictly forbidden.
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  46
   
  The parasites can communicate telepathically, although their intelligence is heavily 
  dependent on that of the host. An unattached louse operates solely on instinct, but once linked to 
  a human host, they become capable of planning and complex thought. 
   
  C. exilis continues to grow while in a human host. over time, it grows big enough such that 
  it blocks the host’s throat, rendering the parasitic relationship unviable. Shortly before the host 
  chokes to death on his own monstrous tongue, it grows a new set of legs and detaches. The psychic 
  shock of disconnection inevitably kills the host. once free of its body, c. exilis goes in search 
  of another host. 
  Fertile Tongue-Eaters
  The lifespan of c. exilis is unknown, but based on its rate of growth, it must be measured in 
  centuries. Adult, fertile tongue-eaters are therefore exceedingly rare.2 A single fertile tongue-
  eater can lay more than fifty eggs per day; these eggs hatch into juvenile c. exilis within 48 hours. 
  ------ ARCANE ABILITIES ------
  C. exilis has a natural ability to project glamours. At all times, an entrenched parasite projects 
  a level 1 glamour that prevents most observers from spotting it. A scrying spell or a sensitive 
  can see the parasite for what it is.
   
  When a parasite needs a new host, it projects a more intense glamour (level three) that 
  compels a victim to make mouth-to-mouth contact with its current host.3 This glamour bypasses any 
  protective wards, as it is a hypnotic effect instead of a geas or other magical spell. Similarly, 
  an adult tongue-eater creates an almost irresistible glamour to draw victims close enough for its 
  newly-hatched children to reach. 
  ------ DomESTICATIoN ------
  If a suitably potent geas spell is applied to an adult tongue-eater, together with the promise 
  of fresh hosts for its spawn, then the creature becomes docile and can be used as a means of 
  mind control. The mother creature resides in a secure location, while the spawn are attached to 
  vulnerable targets. Even without a fertile tongue-eater, individual spawn can be geased into 
  submission, but the lack of a top-down hierarchical control makes this an expensive option.
   
  Tongue-eaters may not be native to Earth. Evidence of tongue-eater activity has been 
  encountered on several off-world expeditions. However, the weight of evidence suggests that c. 
  exilis is connected to BLUE HADES. While they have not been observed to make use of the parasite in 
  the modern era, individual c. exilis specimens have demonstrated an instinctive obedience to BLUE 
  HADES hybrids.
  ------ CoUNTERmEASURES ------
  Exorcisms and banishing rites have no effect on the wholly physical c. exilis. once the creature 
  attaches itself to the hypoglossal nerve, only immediate medical intervention can save the victim. 
  The parasite could be removed using a total glossectomy. A high dose of a suitable anthelmintic (de-
  worming) drug could also force the parasite to detach, but virtually all drugs of this sort are taken 
  orally, and the parasite can block the ingestion of substances it considers harmful. Therefore, the 
  parasite should be injected with a sedative before the host consumes the anthelmintic.
   
  If the parasite is not removed within a short time, it consumes the host’s consciousness 
  and the victim is effectively moribund. Victims of c. exilis infection should be disposed of using 
  zombie protocols.
  2. Presumably, after growing too big for a human host, the parasite needs larger hosts in which to grow. Sperm whales carcasses sometimes 
  wash up on shore with their tongues missing.  
  3. In other words, it zaps you and you french-kiss a fish. Or a zombie. Or a zombie fish. 
  
  47
  Cymothean Parasite, Tongue-Eaters
  Characteristic
  Rolls
  Averages
  STR
  1d3
  2
  CON 
  2d6+4
  11
  SIZ 
  1
  1
  INT 
  1d3
  2
  POW 
  2d6+6
  12-13
  DEX 
  3d6
  11-12
  Move: 4  
   
   
  HP: 6
  Average Damage Bonus: 0
  Weapons: Claw 40%, damage 1d3
  Infest special – if the parasite gets to a creature’s face, the 
  creature must make a Luck roll (this is Easy if the creature 
  knows about the parasite’s abilities). If the Luck roll fails, the 
  creature burrows into the victim’s mouth. Once inside, the 
  creature can only be removed with a Difficult Grapple roll.
  Skills: Climb 70%, Dodge 70%, Hide 90%, Jump 60%, 
  Stealth 90%.
  Spells: A tongue-eater can cast a Level 2 Glamour at the 
  cost of 1d4 temporary POW. The target of this glamour 
  must roll their INT or POW against the glamour’s strength 
  of 14 on the Resistance table. If they fail, they are drawn 
  to kiss the host of the tongue-eater.
  Sanity Loss: 0/1d3 to see a tongue-eater; 1d4/1d10 to 
  have one in your mouth.
  Tongue-Eater Victims
  Those suborned by a tongue-eater have their characteristics 
  changed as follows:
  Characteristic
  Change
  STR
  +2
  CON 
  +4
  SIZ 
  -
  INT 
  -2
  POW 
  Reduced to 0
  DEX 
  -2
   
   
  The host’s skills are unchanged, with the exception of 
  Grapple, which is increased by 20%.
  Fertile Tongue-Eater
  Characteristic
  Rolls
  Averages
  STR
  4d6
  14
  CON 
  4d6+8
  22
  SIZ 
  4d6+8
  22
  INT 
  1d3
  2
  POW 
  2d6+6
  12-13
  DEX 
  2d6
  7
  Move: 4  
   
   
  HP: 22
  Average Damage Bonus: +1d6
  Weapons: Claw 40%, damage 1d6+db
  Armour: 4-point hide
  Spells: A tongue-eater can cast a Level 5 Glamour at the 
  cost of 1d4 temporary POW. The target of this glamour 
  must roll their INT or POW against the glamour’s strength 
  of 24 on the Resistance table. If they fail, they are drawn 
  to kiss the host of the tongue-eater.
  Sanity Loss: 1/1d6 to see a tongue-eater
  Tough Zombies
  Level Three Undead 
  One by one, the mummified corpses are helping each other down 
  from the stakes upon which they were impaled. Limping and 
  wobbling and rattling, they shuffle and lurch towards us across the 
  dusty plain, still wearing the scraps of  Russian civil war uniforms 
  they wore when they were murdered. Many of  them are fully 
  skeletonized, but they’re still articulated, and they carry knives 
  and rusty cavalry sabres. They don’t have working lungs or larynx 
  with which to hiss brains, but you don’t need to have seen many 
  Romero flicks to know what they’ve got in mind.
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  The standard-model Residual Human Resource or 
  possessed corpse – your basic zombie – is a dumb meat 
  robot that obeys basic commands. Nasty up close, but 
  slow, clumsy and easily fooled. The bound demon that 
  drives them like a puppet isn’t very powerful or smart, and 
  it’s running on rapidly-decaying hardware that allows it 
  little freedom of movement.
  MONSTERS
  Monsters
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  48
  The Watch on the Dead Pyramid is another matter. They’re 
  still zombies, but they’re juiced up on the necromantic 
  masterwork of the Mad Baron. They’ve got more initiative 
  than most shambling corpses, and retain the dexterity to 
  use firearms. They’re also tougher and harder to banish 
  than a basic zombie. The Baron’s monsters are the just 
  one example of these improved zombies – any competent 
  necromancer can make similar creatures with an investment 
  of time and souls.
  These creatures retain more of their human intellect, 
  and can even show flashes of their former personalities. 
  They’re horribly alive on some level, which makes the Wall 
  of Pain even more disturbing. These things can still hate... 
  Tough Zombies
  Characteristic
  Rolls
  Averages
  STR
  3d6x1.5
  15-17
  CON 
  3d6x1.5
  15-17
  SIZ 
  2d6+6
  13
  INT 
  1d6
  3-4
  POW 
  3d6
  11-12
  DEX 
  2d6+3
  10
  Move: 6  
   
   
  HP: 14-15
  Average Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Claw 60%, damage 1d4+damage bonus.
  Antique Mosin–Nagant Rifle 40%, damage 2d6+4
  Armour: None, but impaling weapons do one point of 
  damage and all others do half damage.
  Sanity Loss: 1/1d6
  Dead Kings
  These are the reanimated forms of the half-human 
  descendants of Nyatri Tsenpo. They look like elongated 
  mummies, with finger-thick veins bulging out beneath 
  their pale paper-thin skin. Their bodies are almost human, 
  but human limbs don’t bend that way, and humans don’t 
  have quite so many ribs. 
  They are connected to the Dead Plateau by an invisible 
  psychic cord; when alive, they could use this cord to climb 
  back to the Plateau at will. The cord gives them a profane 
  form of immortality – as long as the cord remains intact, 
  the king cannot die.
  DEAD EMPEROR OF TIBET, 
  Neck-Throned Kings
  Characteristic
  Rolls
  Averages
  STR
  6d6
  21
  CON 
  4d6+8
  22
  SIZ 
  3d6+6
  17-18
  INT 
  3d6+6
  17-18
  POW 
  4d6+8
  22
  DEX 
  3d6
  10-11
  Move: 8  
   
   
  HP: 22
  Average Damage Bonus: +2d6
  Weapons: Claw 70%, damage 1d8+db. Sacrificial Dagger 
  80%, damage 1d4+1+db+1d6 temporary POW damage
  Armour: 6-point hide
  Skills: Command 90%, Cthulhu Mythos 75%, Dodge 
  30%, Grapple 70%, Listen 60%, Sense 100%, Sorcery 
  100%, Spot 60%, Track 70%. 
  Sanity Loss: 1/1d8 to see a Dead King
  Magic Cord: A King with an intact magic cord is immortal, 
  and regenerates 1 Hit Point per round when below 0 Hit 
  Points.
  
  49
  Every since the Cambridge Five debacle, contact between 
  the Laundry and its American ‘cousins,’ the Black Chamber 
  has been severely restricted. The other elements of the 
  UK and USA clandestine intelligence networks share 
  information – sometimes freely, sometimes grudgingly – 
  but the relationship between the Laundry and the Chamber 
  makes liquid nitrogen seem toasty warm and friendly. 
  History of  the Black Chamber
  The biggest factor in the occult history of North America 
  was probably smallpox. Infectious diseases brought by 
  European settlers devastated the native population, with 
  fatality figures reaching 80% in some cases. The Native 
  Americans knew an awful lot about the other residents of the 
  American continent, and could have warned those settlers 
  about the things that lived deep underground, about the 
  ghoul tunnels that criss-cross most of the eastern seaboard 
  and about the whispering voices in the dark forests. 
  They could have warned the settlers to shun certain ill-
  favoured hills, and what words and sacrifices kept the 
  hungry ghosts in check – but they died shivering and pock-
  marked. 
  For most of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth 
  centuries, different occult traditions and alien horrors 
  swirled around the fabled American melting pot. The 
  European tradition of witchcraft and traditional sorcery 
  took root in New England, bolstered by emigrant sorcerers 
  fleeing persecution in the Old World. Other waves of 
  immigration brought different folk traditions, which cross-
  pollinated with native beliefs and forged new bargains with 
  local entities and powers. Magic was largely ungoverned – 
  the American equivalent of the 1864 Monster Control Act 
  was not put into Federal Law until 1938, although individual 
  states had similar mandates from 1830 onwards. 
  The Original Black Chamber 
  The present-day Black Chamber can be traced back to the 
  Cipher Bureau founded by Herbert O. Yardley in 1919. 
  It was a joint operation by the US Army and the State 
  Department to preserve the cryptographic expertise built 
  up during the First World War, and aimed at breaking the 
  codes used by other governments (notably the Japanese 
  during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22). 
  That first Black Chamber lasted until 1929, when the State 
  Department withdrew its share of the funding, ostensibly 
  because Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson didn’t believe 
  in the value of cryptographic research. He was patently 
  lying – when he took over as Secretary of War ten years 
  later, he made extensive use of intercepts and decrypted 
  communications. 
  Yardley went on to write a book, The American Black 
  Chamber, in which he decried Stimson’s short-sightedness 
  and exaggerated his own contribution to the Chamber’s 
  successes. In fact, Stimson had decided that Yardley lacked 
  the moral fibre for the Chamber’s new, more secret mission. 
  In the winter of 1927-28, the State Department carried out 
  a ‘strange and secret investigation’ into the coastal town 
  of Innsmouth. The village was a BLUE HADES breeding 
  And finally: they’re the Black Chamber. They’re not so much our sister agency as our psycho ex-girlfriend 
  turned bunny-boiler.
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  The Black Chamber
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  50
  ground and a stronghold of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, 
  and the raid left the State Department in possession of 
  numerous books and artefacts that needed to be decrypted 
  and reverse-engineered, not to mention several hundred 
  surly hybrid prisoners. Most of the Innsmouth prisoners 
  died in captivity, but some proved willing to cooperate and 
  submitted to interrogation. Coupled with the documents 
  translated in 1931 by the Black Chamber, the prisoners 
  revealed the existence not only of a previously unknown 
  hyper-civilisation in the depths of the oceans, but also of a 
  new form of arcane science.
  Yardley’s Cipher Bureau was based in New York; the 
  reformed Black Chamber moved to Providence, Rhode 
  Island. There, it had easy access to the Innsmouth prisoners 
  and the town itself, but also to the extensive archives at 
  nearby Miskatonic University in Arkham, which rapidly 
  became the Chamber’s primary source of new recruits. 
  One key asset that fell into the Black Chamber’s hands in 
  1932 was the notebook of a Miskatonic student, Walter 
  Gilman. A subsequent investigation of Gilman’s background 
  proved that he was related to the inhabitants of Innsmouth, 
  suggesting that some of his discoveries were inspired 
  (consciously or unconsciously) by his inhuman heritage. 
  Gilman was a student of non-Euclidian calculus and 
  quantum physics who identified links between his studies 
  and various occult traditions, and thereby stumbled across 
  elements of the Dee-Turing theorem more than a decade 
  before Alan Turing’s own initial thought experiments on the 
  mathematical generation of Dho-Nha curves. Gilman died 
  before he could be recruited, but by 1937, the Chamber had 
  acquired sufficient magical ability to resurrect him from his 
  essential salts – a process that was partially successful. 
  By that time, of course, the Chamber had already ploughed 
  millions (of 1930s dollars!) into recruiting mathematicians 
  and physicists to weaponise the Gilman papers. The brilliant 
  von Neumann led the charge; delving into Byzantine history, 
  he was able to reconcile the demon-summoning formulae 
  of Theodora with operations in Hilbert space and kicked 
  out Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik as a by-
  product.
  Stimson continued to serve as director for the Black 
  Chamber until 1939, when he convinced Roosevelt to keep 
  the Black Chamber independent of William ‘Wild Bill’ 
  Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services. He argued that the 
  Chamber should focus on the investigation and suppression 
  of the occult, and that its remit should be entirely domestic. 
  On May 1st, 1939, Roosevelt issued a secret Executive 
  Order, authorising the creation of the Office of Scientific 
  Phenomenological Research (OSPR).
  World War II
  While OPSR analysts and counter-occult specialists 
  provided support to the OSS agents in the field during 
  World War II, the Black Chamber never deployed any of 
  its officers overseas, as mandated by the Executive Order 
  limiting it to domestic operations. As the scale of the Nazi 
  occult threat became apparent, however, the OSPR began 
  experimenting with methods for communications and 
  control. Its researchers pioneered the use of Rosen-Waite 
  psychic teleoperation and automatic writing so that the 
  OSPR could operate agent overseas from its base in Rhode 
  Island, and it began making extensive use of geas controls. 
  The OPSR sent its first non-human agent – a bound 
  succubus – overseas in 1942. By the end of the war it had 
  more than two dozen non-human or partly-human agent 
  and had perfected the casting of Class 3 compulsion magics 
  to maximise the target’s flexibility of thought while still 
  maintaining complete control over their actions.
  In 1943, Stimson (still on the board of directors for the OPSR, 
  but now Secretary for War) feared that the Manhattan Project 
  to build a nuclear weapon was progressing too slowly, and 
  that the Nazis would complete Project JOTUNHEIM before 
  the Allies had their bomb. With deep regrets, he directed the 
  OPSR to begin work on its own summoning rites. Doing so 
  required human sacrifices. The OPSR began experimenting 
  on interned prisoners. Initially, these experiments were 
  restricted to the last of the Innsmouth prisoners, but when 
  these ran out, they started using interned German and 
  Japanese citizens. A secret tribunal held in January of 1944 
  determined that the laws regarding treatment of prisoners 
  only applied to humans, and that non-humans and entities 
  that were clearly no longer human did not qualify. OPSR’s 
  Project PROVIDENCE aimed at creating a shortcut to an 
  atomic weapon – instead of meddling around with chain 
  reactions, neutron guns and explosive lens, you just open a 
  Gate to a high-energy dimension and loose seething nuclear 
  chaos upon the Earth. 
  Fortunately – mercifully – the Red Army rolled into Berlin 
  before PROVIDENCE became necessary.
  The Post-War Years
  The OPSR snaffled up as many German physicists, 
  mathematicians and philosophers as it could lay its hands 
  on in the chaotic post-war years. The Nazi necromancers 
  who took part in the Wannsee Invocation were off-limits 
  even to the United States, and those captured were executed 
  following a series of brief, but thorough military trials. Still, 
  covert agents visited the graveyards in the winter of 1946 
  and collected essential salts and samples of grave dirt for 
  future consultation.
  
  51
  The OPSR advised Secretary of State Marshall during 
  the secret talks at Potsdam, where the victorious Allied 
  powers discussed developments of occult weapons 
  since the 1907 Hague Conference, and agreed that no 
  government would pursue the summoning of godlike 
  entities or large-scale Gate openings, nor would mass-
  possession or reality-degradation weapons be permissible 
  in civilised warfare. This left an opening for the OPSR 
  to capitalise on its growing expertise in binding, coupled 
  with its newly-acquired Gate-opening techniques, to bind 
  extradimensional entities to its service in situ. Instead of 
  illegally invoking a potent exonome, they could attempt to 
  penetrate its home dimension and bind it there.
  Co-operation with the Laundry and the other UKUSA Pact 
  members greatly benefited the Black Chamber. The Laundry 
  had the beginnings of computational demonology and 
  much more experience in field necromancy and counter-
  possession techniques. 
  The horrors of the Atrocity Archives convinced the 
  governments of all the Allies that the use of occult weapons 
  could not be permitted. At least a thermonuclear war would 
  be over quickly and the extinction of all human life on 
  Earth would be clean and thorough. A hot war using occult 
  weapons could doom all humanity to a literal eternity of 
  suffering. While hawkish elements in the Chamber argued 
  that the Soviets were almost certain to renege on the secret 
  agreements banning occult weapons, both the Laundry and 
  the Black Chamber agreed that restricting and containing 
  the use of magic was the safest option. 
  Where the Dark Commissioners of the OPSR and the 
  Laundry’s Mahogany Row differed was in their attitude 
  towards BLUE HADES and the other older civilisations 
  and powers. The Laundry’s senior figures argued for a 
  conservative, cautious approach, fearing the repercussions 
  of angering more powerful entities. The Chamber responded 
  that firstly, it had already dealt with several cults and even 
  BLUE HADES incursions in the United States without any 
  trouble; secondly, that nothing could be taken off the table 
  and that it reserved the right to take whatever actions were 
  necessary to protect the United States, and thirdly and most 
  importantly, if they didn’t go for it, then the Soviets would 
  certainly try. 
  The Chamber expanded hugely in the post-war years, 
  becoming ever more secretive and insular. Some of the 
  Laundry’s senior figures began muttering darkly about the 
  dangers of corruption, and worried that their counterparts 
  in the Black Chamber were a little too enthusiastic about 
  certain passages in the Necronomicon. The lure of power is 
  hard to resist. The Laundry had had its troubles with faustian 
  bargains and corrupt wizards centuries ago, and dealt with 
  them through the Black Assizes. The Black Chamber’s 
  sorcerers were far more powerful thanks to Computational 
  Demonology, but no wiser than those medieval apprentices 
  who were dragged before the secret star chamber. 
  The Chamber disengaged from the Laundry after the 
  Cambridge Five scandal in the 1960s. The Chamber blamed 
  the Laundry for leaking GREY CADAVER and other occult 
  information-gathering data to a Soviet spy; the Laundry 
  accused the Black Chamber of skirting the edges of both 
  the Benthic Treaty and the post-war non-proliferation 
  agreements with projects like JENNIFER MORGUE and 
  the alleged PLUTO KOBOLD contacts. It was a messy 
  break-up. Crockery got thrown, and things were said that 
  cannot be unsaid. 
  Rise of  the Nazgûl
  The details are still murky, and not even the dead are able 
  to talk about it, but there was a very nasty night of the 
  long knives among the upper echelons of the Chamber 
  in 1974. Several high-level officers got purged, and others 
  went on the run (they didn’t get far, contrary to certain 
  rumours about ex-Chamber officers hanging out in Belize 
  or Monaco). The Chamber re-organised in 1975, adopting 
  the moniker of the Operational Phenomenology Agency. 
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  52
  It started using the Dark Mark in earnest then, and the 
  upper levels of the Chamber became effectively invisible to 
  their subordinates. For the last thirty years, the Chamber’s 
  been hermitically sealed to outsiders.
  Everyone started calling them the Nazgûl then. Hey, what 
  else do you call invisible monsters who cloak themselves in 
  the semblance of human form, and who offer shiny gold 
  rings of power that suck your soul away?
  Every grimoire is an apocalypse codex. Every mercury-
  crazed sorcerer and visionary talked about the end of 
  the world. We’ve known about what we now call CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN for centuries, but it was only in the 
  last few years that we’ve started to prepare for it properly. 
  Even the old enemy in the Kremlin acknowledges that we’re 
  all in this together, ever since they dug up those scrolls in 
  Afghanistan and realised the folly of fighting a war on two 
  fronts. While the Laundry may scuffle with the Thirteenth 
  Directorate or other groups, we all follow the same rules of 
  engagement. We all want humanity to survive…
  …but no-one’s sure who’s calling the shots at the top of 
  humanity’s biggest and baddest occult agency. If you were 
  a cosmic horror planning on eating the world, wouldn’t 
  you start by subverting the group with the best chance of 
  stopping you?
  The Strange Case of PLUTO KOBOLD
  As you know, Bob, ol' HPL wrote about a race 
  of fungoid beings from Yuggoth, aka Pluto, who 
  flapped down to Earth to mine rare minerals and 
  steal our brains. Lovecraft knew a lot more 
  than he had any right to, even when you take 
  into account that he did a lot of research at 
  Miskatonic and that the Black Chamber’s first 
  headquarters was just around the corner from 
  his home in Providence. Most occultists who’ve 
  made the connection between what Lovecraft 
  wrote and the horrific reality that we live in 
  tend to overestimate his insight. He got a lot 
  of stuff right, but he got even more wrong.
  The Mi-Go were assumed to be something that 
  he made up, or cobbled together from a dozen 
  different sources. Certainly, the Laundry 
  believed them to be a myth up until the mid 
  ‘60s, when our sniffers started to hear rumours 
  about a Black Chamber project connected to the 
  space race. Allegedly, the Chamber had made 
  contact with the Mi-Go, gotten into a brief 
  scrap with them, but then signed a treaty with 
  them. The Mi-Go got to continue their mining 
  and bizarre medical experimentation, while 
  the Black Chamber got access to some bits of 
  alien technology and sorcery. The whole thing 
  was, according to the rumours, based on the 
  Benthic Treaty, only this time the Chamber 
  cut the rest of humanity out and negotiated 
  a unilateral deal with the space mushrooms. 
  A confirmed upswing in bizarre deaths, alien 
  abductions, and stories about little green men 
  followed. Later came the GOBLIN HEDGE raids, 
  when a double agent within the Esoteric Order 
  of the Silver Twilight managed to steal the 
  Order’s copies of several documents that it 
  had stolen from the Chamber. Those documents 
  confirmed the earlier rumours. Pretty soon 
  after that, we got hold of our first Mi-Go 
  corpse, and Laundry analysts were able to talk 
  to one in the ‘90s under the information-
  sharing terms of the Benthic Treaty. So, Mi-
  Go are real, the Chamber got them first, case 
  closed, right?
  Maybe not. There are two distinct but equally 
  disturbing possibilities here.
  Option 1: Take it all at face value. The 
  Black Chamber bargained with brain-stealing 
  space aliens, trading the lives of American 
  citizens in exchange for occult secrets and 
  the promise that the Mi-Go won’t wipe us out. 
  In this scenario, the Chamber’s got an edge 
  over every other occult intelligence agency 
  out there, but one it bought at a high price. 
  The Mi-Go must be pretty terrifying for the US 
  Government to allow them to conduct the murder 
  and dissection of American citizens. 
  Option 2: It’s a ploy. There are no Mi-Go. The 
  Chamber faked the whole thing. It was initially 
  a scheme to hoodwink the US Government – “If 
  you don’t co-operate, and let us, er the 
  spacemen do whatever we want, there’ll be a 
  flying saucer hovering over the White House by 
  Tuesday”. and now the Chamber has expanded 
  it to fool other occult intelligence groups. 
  While everyone’s chasing Mi-Go stories, the 
  Chamber’s off pursuing its real goal.
  
  53
  Playing a Black Chamber Character 
  The default assumption for Laundry Files games 
  is that you’re playing agents of the Laundry (the 
  clue’s in the name) and that the Black Chamber 
  are the bad guys. Yes, they’ve got more cool 
  toys and they’re better dressed and they don’t 
  have to suffer through as much bureaucracy, 
  but the Laundry has more... Character? Tea? Oh 
  wait, moral fibre, that was it. The Black Chamber 
  consists of scary bastards in the extreme. “We 
  had to turn the human population into fodder 
  for our summoned alien slave-gods in order to 
  save them”.
  This chapter does contain rules for generating 
  Black Chamber characters. These rules are 
  primarily for the GM’s benefit, or for creating 
  ex-Chamber 
  defectors 
  (see 
  the 
  rules 
  for 
  Breaking Oaths on page 66), but if you want to 
  play a Chamber game, see the campaign advice 
  on page 75.
  Black Chamber characters are created just like 
  regular Laundry characters, following the steps 
  in Chapter 4 of the Laundry Files rulebook, 
  with the following exceptions:
  Step One: Choose whether you’re playing a human 
  officer, an inhuman asset, or a thrall.
  • 
  Follow the steps below to create a human 
  officer or an inhuman asset. For more on 
  non-human player character, see the Agent’s 
  Handbook.
  • 
  For a thrall, use any character creation 
  rules (either these ones, the basic rules 
  in the Laundry Files, or the Outside 
  the Laundry characters from the Agent’s 
  Handbook). You don’t work for the Chamber 
  directly, but you bear the Dark Mark (see 
  page 63). Ignore the rest of this section.
  Step Eight: 
  • 
  Pick one of the Assignments described in 
  this chapter instead. 
  • 
  Add the following skill bonuses: Bureaucracy 
  +10, Cthulhu Mythos +5, Firearms (any) +5, 
  Knowledge (Espionage) +10, Sorcery +5, 
  Spot +5, Technology Use (any) +5, any other 
  skill +5. 
  Step Nine: 
  • 
  Black Chamber characters are bound with 
  either the Dark Mark (see page 63) or a 
  demon (see page 64), assuming that they’re 
  not already dead (see page 69).
  • 
  Black Chamber characters are all armed.
  Structure of  the Operational 
  Phenomenology Agency
  Here’s how highly the Nazgûl value your soul – even if 
  you’re completely and utterly their creature, body and 
  soul, they still don’t trust you enough to even give you an 
  organisation chart. You don’t need to know it. The OPA 
  generally isn’t an organisation that you can advance in. For 
  the most part, they don’t recruit promising talent – they 
  recruit tools.
  Actually, the OPA can be considered to be six siloed 
  organisations within the same body, organisations that rarely 
  meet. At the very top, there’s the Dark Commissioners and 
  the Director. They’re generally referred to as the Dark 
  Lords. Below them, there’s Control, the Unblinking Red-
  Rimmed Eye.
  Under Control (if you’ll pardon the expression) are the 
  six major divisions of the Chamber – Assets, Monitoring, 
  Operations, Support, Arcana and Research. Each division 
  is highly compartmentalised – Mo, for example, was 
  technically working for the Research Division when she was 
  in the United States, but had no idea about the real identity 
  of her owne – um, employers. 
  Each of these divisions has manpower and funding that 
  dwarfs the Laundry like a shoggoth dwarfs a small lump 
  of snot. The War on Terror was very good for the United 
  States intelligence community’s budget, with billions 
  of dollars ending up funnelled into dozens of secretive 
  agencies and think tanks, and the Nazgûl hollowed them all 
  out and turned them into more bureaucratic wraiths, empty 
  offices that exist purely to suck up more cash. The Black 
  Chamber is staggeringly huge and byzantine.
  Director
  The Director of the OPA sits on the Intelligence Community 
  committee alongside the directors of the NSA, NRO, CIA, 
  FBI and a whole alphabet soup of other agencies. Given 
  the Black Chamber’s predilection for remote operation 
  and wearing fleshy masks, there’s every probability that the 
  Director is a puppet for someone else, or even something else. 
  The Director is supposed to be appointed by the President, 
  but it’s close to being the other way around these days.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  54
  Dark Commissioners 
  The OPA’s counterpart to the Laundry’s Mahogany Row. 
  They work for the Director, and one squats at the head of 
  each of the six Divisions. Little is known about them. 
  Control
  Control is the evil genius (and that’s the old meaning of 
  genius, the divine spirit within every individual) of the Black 
  Chamber. As far as the Laundry can determine, Control 
  is made up of several dozen skilled sorcerers, although 
  it could be a single entity or a gestalt of some sort. They 
  share the Control identity and callsign, but have different 
  personalities and specialities. The members of Control have 
  three key responsibilities.
  First, they run the day-to-day operations of the Black 
  Chamber. If you’ve got the clearance, you can pick up 
  a phone – any phone – and call them. Control knows 
  pretty much everything, and can tap into police, federal or 
  corporate databases seemingly at will. 
  Second, they’re the Eye. They can synthesise all the data 
  from Monitoring in real-time, and augment it with data 
  from other sources, both occult and conventional. It’s not 
  paltry remote viewing – imagine a cluster of expert psychics 
  feeding into a stochastic correction model, augmented with 
  the biggest scry-surveillance network and live data from 
  innumerable drones and satellites. That means that they can 
  literally see anything that happens within the continental 
  United States, and have terrifyingly good vision throughout 
  most of the world. If Control’s looking in your direction, 
  they can see you from the inside out and snarf your password 
  from the reflection on your eyeball. The Eye is all-seeing. 
  They can also exert influence through their gaze. If the Eye 
  fixes its gaze upon you, the shock of attention is worth a 
  1/1d4 SAN test. By manipulating probability, the Eye’s gaze 
  can give a +10% bonus or -10% penalty to any rolls made 
  within its field of vision. 
  Third, Control can body-jump into anyone who bears the 
  Dark Mark. They don’t need to be invited in – if you wear 
  the Mark, they can use you as a meat sleeve at will. Control 
  has full command of the host body’s movements and 
  actions, and can use it as a channel for spellcasting (with 
  most of the processing done locally, so if Control fucks up 
  the spell, the host is the one who gets K-Syndrome). 
  So far, the Laundry has observed the following Controls, 
  codenamed according to the original thirteen colonies. 
  These codenames do not reflect the individual Controls’ 
  area of origin or influence; Control’s reach is global and all 
  the suspected different Controls seem to be peers. 
  New Hampshire: Impatient, extremely violent, low 
  boredom threshold. Quite possibly psychotic. The Laundry 
  believes this Control to be young and female. She’s the most 
  skilled Control in close combat.
  Massachusetts: Massachusetts seems to have some 
  added responsibilities beyond his duties as Control, as he 
  sometimes seems distracted. Several times, he appeared to 
  have conversations with a third party while in control of a 
  body. Obviously, observers only heard Control’s half of the 
  Beating the Eye
  The Eye is all-seeing… up to a point. It can only look in one place at a time, so you can distract 
  the Eye. If it’s sweeping New York for a concealed dirty bomb, then you’re free to smuggle 
  shoggoths into San Francisco.
  It is also possible to hide from Control’s fiery gaze. The Eye’s vision is made up of three components 
  – remote vision, magical scrying from contagion subjects and digital imaging.
  Blocking the first one requires an Area Ward or Entropic Manipulation to block the goat-fanciers. 
  The second component relies on there being living witnesses who are part of the contagion network 
  – either full-fledged stringers or just unwitting observers. If there’s no-one else around, the 
  Eye can’t see you (assuming you’re not part of the contagion grid). Finally, while Control can 
  hijack any wired-in security camera, hop onto the nearest drone or even redirect a passing KH12 spy 
  satellite, they can’t look through walls. No cameras, no eyes.
  Of course, the Eye gets tetchy when it can’t find someone. Creating blind spots in the Eye 
  irritates it, and an angry Control is never, ever a good thing.
  
  55
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  conversation, but he appeared to be arguing with a superior, 
  possibly the Director or a more senior Control. 
  Rhode Island: Avuncular, cynical, erudite, this Control 
  is most often encountered when dealing with other occult 
  intelligence agencies or when the Black Chamber deigns 
  to talk to the US Government. He appears to have special 
  authority with regards to diplomacy, and can override other 
  Controls in certain circumstances. This Control is a chain 
  smoker; when his host does not have a cigarette to hand, 
  he fidgets.
  Connecticut: Speech patterns suggest an elderly male. 
  Connecticut is extremely callous and seems to enjoy using 
  host bodies as disposable sleeves. Last encountered in 1997; 
  the Laundry suspects the previous Connecticut has died, 
  but a replacement has yet to be identified.
  New York: Soft-spoken, professional, possibly an academic. 
  New York is associated with the Black Chamber’s Arcana 
  and Research divisions.
  New Jersey: Comes across like a Marine Drill Sergeant 
  or a DHS hardass. Often deployed as a bully to intimidate 
  annoyances and get the troops in line, but has also been 
  sighted commanding teams in combat.
  Pennsylvania: Never speaks. His area of expertise seems 
  to be tradecraft, street artistry and assassination. 
  Delaware: The Delaware Control is the one most likely 
  to jump into a host unexpectedly. He seems to abuse his 
  position, using host bodies for sexual encounters or just 
  for shits and giggles – for example, he once took control 
  of a stringer and walked her off a 20th floor balcony to 
  demonstrate the strength of the Dark Mark. The other 
  Controls did not censor him for his behaviour.
  Maryland: Believed to be an older female. Like Rhode 
  Island, Maryland has trumped other Controls in the past. 
  Her role appears to be that of a troubleshooter; she’s most 
  often encountered when operations need a firm hand at the 
  tiller to salvage them.
  Virginia: The Virginia Control has never been observed 
  to speak except in Enochian and other arcane tongues, 
  and is strangely inept at controlling host bodies. When in 
  possession, hosts move in a way that’s been described as 
  ‘spasming’ or ‘insect-like.’ 
  North Carolina: The North Carolina Control primarily 
  handles overseas operations. Virtually all encounters with 
  this Control happened between 0200 and 0800 hours EST, 
  suggesting that North Carolina may be the OPA’s night 
  shift Control, or that he is physically located somewhere in 
  Europe.
  South Carolina: The South Carolina Control appears to 
  be the group’s technical expert, and is called in when a host 
  needs computer skills. Speech patterns suggest a young 
  male.
  Georgia: Affects a ‘good ol’ boy’ attitude, and has a strong 
  Texan accent. His expertise seems to be in the military and 
  technical fields.
  The Black Chamber has hundreds of other mind riders who 
  tele-operate zombies and other assets. These drone pilots may 
  also take control of thralls as needed. Presumably, replacement 
  Controls are drawn from this pool of junior operators.
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  56
  Controlled by Control
  Only one thing left. Utter desperation and fear 
  threaten to weaken his knees before he can do 
  it. It’s a last resort: maybe they can—
  ***Help?***
  Patrick 
  loses 
  consciousness 
  immediately. 
  Someone else looks out through his eyes, 
  someone more detached, with the aloof cruelty 
  of a small boy contemplating the antics of 
  insects trapped in a jam jar.
  “Hello,” says Patrick’s mouth.
  And then, with an agility alien to a sixty- 
  year-old in poor condition, he stoops sideways 
  and scoops up the shotgun.
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  If Control grabs hold of a character, then 
  they can use that character’s body as if it was 
  their own. The same features hold true for all 
  Controls:
  • 
  Control ignores the effects of damage. If 
  the character’s taken a Major Wound, ignore 
  any CON, DEX or STR losses. A body can’t 
  lose consciousness either when puppeted by 
  Control. The downside is that if Control 
  takes possession of a body that’s suffered 
  a Major Wound or has been reduced to 0 hit 
  points, then that body takes another 1d6 
  damage when Control leaves.
  • 
  Control has scores of at least 70% in 
  Command, Insight, Knowledge (Politics), 
  Knowledge (Espionage), Knowledge (Occult), 
  Listen, Sense, Sorcery and Spot.
  • 
  Control doesn’t need to make Sanity checks 
  under most circumstances (and any situation 
  that’s scary enough to freak out Control 
  probably means that the host is dead 
  anyway).
  • 
  Control’s got a form of Second Sight, and 
  can see magical effects, thaumic fields, 
  invisible creatures and so on – treat as a 
  Level 2 Scrying spell that is always on. 
  Different Controls have different skills. 
  Assume that each Control’s got 100% in at three 
  key skills related to his specialty, and 80% 
  in any skills that are arguably related to that 
  specialty.  
  Control’s a busy evil overlord. If there are 
  other demands on Control’s time, it may stay 
  for just long enough to complete a conversation 
  or overcome some obstacle, then hop out. 
  Calling Control: A character who bears the Dark 
  Mark can voluntarily call upon Control. Calling 
  Control works just like a Support Requisition 
  (see page 106 of the Laundry Files). The 
  difficulty of the test depends on what the 
  character needs from Control.
  Basic advice or information: Easy
  Intervention with another government agency, 
  spellcasting, classified info: Average
  Possession, extensive spellcasting: Difficult 
  Seized by Control: If a character wants to 
  resist being taken by Control, then he can try. 
  He has to pit his POW against Control’s POW of 
  20 on the Resistance Table. Success means that 
  he can ward Control off for one round, but a 
  fresh contest must be made in each round if 
  Control keeps trying to worm its way in.
  Most wards and other protective spells can’t 
  keep Control at bay. If you’re wearing the Dark 
  Mark, then Control is part of you already. It 
  is possible to break free of the Mark, but it’s 
  not easy – see Breaking Your Oath on page 66.
  The host is still conscious and aware when 
  Control is in charge. If Control, say, chooses 
  to stick your own shotgun in your mouth and 
  pull the trigger, you’ll taste the cold metal 
  of the barrel and feel your own finger tighten 
  on the trigger. In fact, given the service 
  motto of the Black Chamber, you’ll feel that 
  slug tear through your living brain and blow 
  out the back of your skull.
  Control & Sanity: Being ridden by Control costs 
  0/1 Sanity. Being taken against your will is 
  worth a 1d6/1d10 loss. If Control uses your 
  body to do unspeakable things, then the SAN 
  loss from those acts is doubled. 
  
  57
  Assets Division
  The Black Chamber’s renowned for taking the Human 
  out of Human Intelligence. Other intelligent species don’t 
  count as human under US law, so the Chamber’s free to 
  make use of them as living weapons. Assets Division runs 
  the menagerie of bound servitors and trapped horrors. 
  Some of these, like Ramona, are cloaked in glamours so 
  that they can pass for human. Others… are harder to hide. 
  Each Asset is paired with a controller, who carries that 
  Asset’s tokens of binding – magical artefacts keyed to that 
  Asset’s demon, which give the controller the power of 
  command over the agent. Agents who fail are punished – 
  the Chamber can’t steal their souls, but it can make them 
  wish for oblivion. Assets Division also runs the Chamber’s 
  extensive necromancy section. 
  The Chamber makes extensive use of remote-control 
  zombies and lobotomised meat puppets, not to mention 
  the fact that you don’t ever escape the Chamber’s control 
  thanks to the Dark Mark’s soul-capture subroutine. Those 
  who die wearing the Dark Mark have their consciousness 
  preserved in the vaults of the Black Chamber. These bound 
  ghosts are stored in glass jars in endless filing cabinets in a 
  former coal mine. 
  The third category of Assets are stringers and informants 
  (thralls, in company lingo) who have taken the Dark Mark, 
  but are not actually employed by the OPA. The Chamber has 
  thousands of these agents across the world. Some were paid to 
  take the Dark Mark, others chose it out of fear or desperation. 
  Assets Assignments
  Necromancer: Command, Computer Use (Magic),
  Medicine (any), Science (Thaumaturgy),
  Sorcery.
  Remote Operator: Computer Use (any), Firearms
  (any), Technology Use (any), Spot, Strategy.
  Asset Controller: Command, Knowledge
  (Espionage), Insight, Psychoanalysis,
  Sorcery.
  Inhuman Asset: Any three skills, plus one 
  special skill related to your inhuman nature.
  See the Laundry Agent’s Handbook for more on 
  inhuman characters.
  The Chamber’s thralls can be found in many different 
  fields. Obviously, there are plenty of ex-cultists, criminals, 
  police officers, spies and mercenaries in the mix, along with 
  the rare book dealers, cryptographers, black-hat hackers, 
  weapons dealers and sinister antiquarians who lurk on 
  the fringes of the occult world, but the Chamber has eyes 
  everywhere. Anyone could bear the Mark.
  Control may or may not be part of Assets Division. The 
  Laundry suspects it got moved in and out during recent 
  reforms, possibly reflecting internal strife within the ranks 
  of the Dark Lords.
  Monitoring Division
  The counterpart to the Laundry’s Monitoring section, but a 
  whole lot bigger. Telephone conversations, email and other 
  internet traffic, news, snail mail, reports from stringers 
  and informants, and a whole lot of remote viewing and 
  contagion-magic data goes through here. Monitoring sorts 
  through it and sends the juicy stuff to Operations, Arcana 
  or Research if it’s actionable, or Control can use the whole 
  division as one big fiery eyeball.
  The Chamber’s got access to a few tricks the Laundry doesn’t 
  – it’s got more money and fewer ethics, so it can do stuff 
  like run a contagion grid using blood samples taken from 
  American citizens – if the Black Chamber has ever tasted your 
  blood, they can find you and watch you with scrying magic. 
  Based on what the Laundry picked up during the events 
  of JENNIFER MORGUE, the Black Chamber intends to 
  have 95% of the US population tagged by the time CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN rolls around. By then it will have 
  up-to-the-minute data on possessions and mass deaths across 
  the country, which will come in very handy when deciding 
  where to allocate resources and where to sacrifice.
  Monitoring Assignments
  Analyst: Bureaucracy, Computer Use (any),
  Research, any two Knowledge skills. 
  Cryptographer: Computer Use (any),
  Knowledge (Espionage), Science
  (Cryptography), Science (Mathematics), Spot.
  Human Terrain Technician: Insight,
  Persuade, Knowledge (group), Knowledge 
  (Linguistics), Knowledge (any).
  Remote Viewer: Computer Use (Magic),
  Knowledge (Espionage), Sense, Spot, Sorcery.
  Station Officer: Bureaucracy, Knowledge (Region), 
  Knowledge (Linguistics), Firearm (any), Stealth.
  Operations
  Field Operations are messy, dangerous things. They often 
  involve travel, violence, hard choices and the risk of death 
  or serious injury. The Black Chamber, therefore, doesn’t like 
  to get its hands dirty with field ops.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  58
  Other people’s hands, though, are fair game. 
  OPA Operations are characterised by the use of proxies 
  (either knowing proxies like a bound Asset, or unwitting 
  dupes), false flags, undercover officers and very dirty tricks. 
  Operations gets some third party or an Asset to do the hard 
  work, then swoops in and grabs the prize. The Laundry’s 
  been on the sharp end of a few OPA ops in the past, but 
  we invented this sort of double-cross, and we’re too old and 
  canny for them to catch us out most days. No, the Black 
  Chamber’s usual dupes are well-meaning investigators, 
  private corporations and other parts of the US Government. 
  The Nazgûl are very, very good at extracting maximum 
  return from minimum effort.
  Operations, therefore, is a surprisingly small division within 
  the OPA. They only need a handful of human field officers. 
  These field officers are the best that the OPA can muster – 
  sneaky, duplicitous buggers the lot of them, backed up with 
  the full attention of the Eye and the unparalleled resources 
  of the world’s biggest occult intelligence outfit. 
  They need it, too. While the Chamber prefers to use proxies, 
  the Nazgûl are crazily ambitious. When a cult high priest 
  tries to summon his squiddy god and end the world, the 
  Laundry’s instinctive response is to have a cup of tea, then 
  a second cup of tea over a budgeting meeting, and then a 
  third cup with two sugars from a thermos flask just before 
  sniping the head priest with a silver bullet. The Nazgûls’ 
  instinctive reaction is to hand the high priest everything 
  that he needs, wait for the summoning ceremony to get 
  into full swing, then wipe out the cult, stuff the god into a 
  binding pentagram and stick its unholy ass in an undisclosed 
  location for future interrogation and possible employment. 
  Typical American bravado.
  Speaking of which, the Chamber has its own military unit 
  modelled on the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and is 
  believed to have an arrangement with SOCOM’s Advanced 
  Force Operations to obtain whatever Special Forces are 
  needed. 
  Operations also handles mind control, and here’s another 
  place where the Chamber’s approach differs from that of 
  the Laundry. The Laundry uses mind-wipes sparingly, as 
  erasing too many memories can cause all sorts of nasty side 
  effects (psychotic delusions, for example). If a civilian saw 
  too much to be safely wiped, they get to sign Section III 
  and are drafted into the Laundry, where Personnel shunts 
  them into a vaguely suitable job. That’s why the Laundry is 
  over-staffed with clueless office drones – most of the staff 
  qualified for their job by being too stupid to run away when 
  the eldritch chanting started.
  The Black Chamber doesn’t do that. They only take the best 
  – if you work for them, it’s because you have valuable skills 
  or because they’ve got your soul by the spiritual balls. They’re 
  not going to recruit some hick from Bumfuck, Illinois just 
  because he saw a shantak eating his cows. The Chamber’s got 
  lots of Men in Black to wipe people’s memories, and they 
  don’t care about the side effects. That’s what health insurance 
  is for. There’s a reason for all those alien abduction stories…
  Operations Assignments
  Technician: Computer Use (any), Fine 
  Manipulation, Repair, Sleight of Hand, 
  Technology Use (any).
  Wetworks: Brawl, Firearms (any), Hide, 
  Stealth, Spot.
  Black Bagger: Demolition, Fine Manipulation, 
  Hide, Stealth, Technology Use (any).
  Street Operative: Disguise, Drive, Knowledge 
  (Espionage), Insight, Stealth. 
  Field Sorcerer: Computer Use (Magic), 
  Knowledge (Occult), Science (Thaumaturgy), 
  Science (Mathematics), Sorcery.
  Armed Support: Artillery, Command, Firearms 
  (any), Heavy Weapon (any), Strategy.
  
  59
  Support
  The Support Division takes care of the Chamber’s 
  infrastructure and physical assets, and houses the 
  bureaucracy, liaisons with the other branches of 
  government, manages the black budget and other bits of 
  nightmarish housekeeping. The OPA is at the centre of 
  a web of government contractors and support agencies, 
  groups like TLA and Moonstone Metatechnology, and 
  that all goes through Support. There’s rumoured to be a 
  revolving door between the upper echelons of this division 
  and the boards of various occult technology corporations 
  – you put in your time in the OPA, and then get a fat 
  paycheque selling stuff to your old employers. (Of course, 
  you never really leave… if the Nazgûl permit you to join a 
  corporation; it’s just a ruse to bind that corporation closer 
  to the dark throne).
  The Chamber’s approach to security is… unforgiving. Lethal 
  countermeasures are widely employed. If an employee 
  triggers a death spell, then Internal Affairs have a chat to 
  his trapped soul. If a civilian gets zapped, well, that gets 
  shunted over to Operations to sort out. They can resurrect 
  the civilian as a zombie who thinks he’s alive (it’s a pretty 
  simple hack), or just erase all records and memories of the 
  deceased.
  Support Assignments
  Bureaucrat: Bureaucracy, Knowledge 
  (Accounting), Computer Use (any), Knowledge 
  (Business), Status.
  Computer Technician: Computer Use (any two), 
  Repair, Science (any), Technology Use (any).
  Political Liaison: Bureaucracy, Knowledge 
  (Politics), Knowledge (Espionage), Insight, 
  Status.
  Purchasing: Appraise, Bureaucracy, Knowledge 
  (Accounting), Science (Thaumaturgy), 
  Technology Use (any).
  Facilites Management: Craft (any), Heavy 
  Machine (any), Repair (any), Spot, Sorcery.
  Security: Firearms (any), Dodge, Listen, 
  Sorcery, Spot.
  Internal Affairs: Command, Bureaucracy, 
  Insight, Sorcery, Status.
  Arcana 
  Driving American scientific research since the 1950s, the 
  Division of Arcana wields more arcane power than any 
  other body on the face of the Earth (this declaration 
  void below the thousand-metre Benthic Treaty line, or 
  below the Mohorovičić discontinuity). Division of Arcana 
  necromancers and sorcerers get to play with all the coolest 
  toys that a bloated military-industrial complex can build. 
  The Black Chamber’s biggest triumphs – that we know about, 
  anyway – are in the field of binding. The Laundry is happy to 
  keep the many-angled ones at bay on their side of the Calabi-
  Yau manifold, but the Chamber deliberately seeks out and 
  binds extremely powerful entities in massive containment 
  grids. They were grabbing class fours by the early 1960s, 
  and certainly made an attempt to bind an aspect of GIZA 
  DISORDER (aka Nyarlathotep) in 1978. The ultimate 
  intent of this project is unknown – during the Cold War, the 
  Laundry assumed that the Chamber planned to use these 
  bound entities as weapons if things went hot, but their rate 
  of acquisition has only increased since the fall of the Soviet 
  Union. It’s possibly that they’re trying to pre-emptively thin 
  out the ranks of the Great Old Ones before the Stars Come 
  Right, or that they believe they can somehow control these 
  entities and use them against their own kind. Some paranoids 
  suggested that the Chamber has made a deal with some of 
  the brain eaters, and that their summoned prisoners are 
  actually dinner guests who prebooked seats at the humanity 
  buffet in exchange for sparing the waiting staff.
  Arcana Assignments
  Occult Scientist: Cthulhu Mythos, Computer 
  Use  (Magic), Knowledge (Occult), Science 
  (Mathematics), Science (Thaumaturgy).
  Binder: Cthulhu Mythos, Computer Use 
  (Magic), Command, Knowledge (Occult), 
  Science (Thaumaturgy).
  Gate Technician: Computer Use (Magic), 
  Science (Physics), Science (Astronomy), 
  Science (Thaumaturgy), Navigate. 
  Research
  Thousands of academics across the world unwittingly 
  work for the Black Chamber. Research Division spends 
  millions of dollars backing seemingly obscure PhD topics 
  and translation projects. Army cash ends up being funnelled 
  into studies of Babylonian theology or the philosophical 
  implications of string theory. Dr. O’Brien’s work at 
  Miskatonic, for example, was funded by the Black Chamber.
  The Chamber has its own version of the Laundry’s Stacks; 
  several of them, in fact. There’s the Nightmare Archive on 
  their company intranet, the expanded Wilmarth collection 
  in the Providence building, and – allegedly – several floors 
  of the extradimensional library at Celeano (staffed with 
  armed librarians in spacesuits packing banishing rounds). 
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  60
  Research Assignments
  Archivist: Cthulhu Mythos, Knowledge 
  (Occult), Knowledge (Linguistics), Research, 
  any Knowledge or Science. 
  Translator: Cthulhu Mythos, Knowledge 
  (Linguistics), Knowledge (History), 
  Research, any Knowledge or Science. 
  Researcher: Cthulhu Mythos, any two 
  Sciences, Research, Sorcery. 
  Working for the Black Chamber
  The Laundry recruits promiscuously, grabbing anyone who 
  might have ever glimpsed the supernatural. Most of the 
  Laundry’s staff is semi-competent, clueless, bored or crazy, 
  and the small core of really talented officers has to wade 
  through a morass of bureaucracy. The Laundry moves with 
  all the efficiency and grace of a morbidly obese hippo with 
  severe OCD. 
  The Chamber isn’t like that. Put simply, the Chamber 
  doesn’t fuck about. They’ve got a bottomless black budget 
  and virtually no oversight. They can do what they have 
  to do to protect the United States from an invisible and 
  impending danger. That means that every employee of the 
  Black Chamber is (a) easily replaceable, as they can always 
  find someone else with your skills, or just kill you and bring 
  you back in a more compliant form. Every employee is 
  also (b) obsessively driven to succeed and hit their targets, 
  because they’re (c) scared shitless of what management 
  might do to them.
  At least in the Laundry, you know that someone’s 
  monitoring the Auditors. The Dark Commissioners have 
  no such limitations. 
  Chamber	Officers
  If you’re human and inside the Chamber, congratulations! 
  You’re one of the trusted few, the acolytes to the dark gods 
  named Control and the Dark Commissioners. This is as 
  likely as far as you’ll ever rise, but that’s okay – you’re the 
  ultimate Washington insider, one of the men in black who 
  can topple presidents and start wars. Most of the human 
  officers have desk jobs or couch jobs (remote possession 
  of assets); field officers are a distinct minority among the 
  human contingent. The Black Chamber recruits most of 
  its human staff out of college. Chamber head-hunters 
  scour the Ivy League and other respected universities for 
  potential recruits. The ideal Chamber recruit majored in 
  political science, history, languages, physics, computer 
  science, mathematics or economics, is physically fit and 
  healthy, and is ambitious, but dissatisfied. The Chamber 
  prefers candidates with a religious background, but who 
  are non-believers. The Chamber rarely takes ‘no’ for an 
  answer – those who refuse to answer their nation’s call are 
  often recruited later through indirect means. They might be 
  subtly influenced to join a research institute that’s secretly 
  a Black Chamber project, or allowed to rise into a position 
  of influence in the government or private sector and then 
  recruited as a stringer. 
  Inhuman Assets
  The legal foundation for the Chamber’s Inhuman Assets 
  section is the landmark case of Marsh v United States 
  (1937) when lawyers for the Innsmouth detainees sued the 
  American government for wrongful arrest and detention. 
  In a secret ruling, the Supreme Court voted 6-1 against the 
  appeal, deciding that citizenship and human rights applied 
  only to entities that were human, and that the Deep One 
  hybrids did not qualify. (The British Monster Control Act, by 
  contrast, rules that hybrids and other quasi-human entities 
  are legally human, but their rights can be constrained for 
  reasons of public health and safety, just like medusas.). 
  The majority of inhuman assets, of course, are completely 
  inhuman and non-sapient. The Chamber has an arsenal 
  of bound demons writhing inside containment grids, of 
  shoggoths slumbering in former missile silos, of byakhee 
  circling endlessly above Creech Air Force base in Nevada. 
  They dragged shambling horrors out of the vaults beneath 
  the Curwen farm outside Arkham, and captured thousands 
  of ghouls from the tunnels under Boston under the cover 
  of the Big Dig in the 1990s. 
  The assets that can pass for human through the use of 
  glamours live almost-human lives. They’re paid by the 
  Chamber and are permitted to maintain civilian identities. 
  The Chamber keeps them under control by means of 
  a bound demon. A human case officer gets assigned as a 
  handler to each inhuman asset.
  The Chamber’s Infernal Lawyers interpret Marsh v United 
  States to mean that formerly human entities no longer 
  count as human, too. Obviously, the dead don’t have human 
  rights, so resurrected or soul-bound officers also fall under 
  the inhuman assets category. Some of the more powerful 
  undead retain enough political pull (or sheer magical might) 
  to retain their independence, but for most staff, getting 
  killed means a significant downgrade in your status within 
  the Chamber.
  Victims of possession are also tagged as non-human if 
  banishing the demon would kill the host. Many possessors 
  sink their psychic claws into the host’s nervous system, so 
  
  61
  that even if they’re banished, they take chunks of the host’s 
  psyche with them. The former possessed is left a drooling 
  vegetable or a hollow shell. The Chamber has the magical 
  skill to bound possessor demons, turning demon and victim 
  into a single asset. (Of course, if they’ve got the magical 
  skill to do that, then they also have the necessary skill to 
  unpick the demon’s psychic hold and free the host safely – 
  but if they did that, the host would be legally human again, 
  and outside their jurisdiction...).
  Thralls
  The Chamber’s vast web of spies and sleeper agents all 
  wear the Dark Mark. It’s standard operating procedure for 
  the Chamber to “stamp and vamp” any potentially useful 
  contacts encountered on a mission. If a cult tries kidnapping 
  a professor of linguistics so that she can translate their copy 
  of the Book of  Eibon, then once the gore finishes dripping 
  from the ceiling and the cleaning staff mop up the remains, 
  that professor will find herself in an anonymous room with 
  an anonymous Chamber drone, and she’ll be “encouraged” 
  to take the Dark Mark. In the next office down the hall, the 
  cult leader gets the same offer – the Chamber is catholic in 
  its hungers. Every soul can be useful in one way or another.
  Most informants go for years without any contact from the 
  Chamber. They live their little lives and try to forget about 
  the oddly patterned black scar on their bodies. The Chamber 
  provides for some useful informants (money, medical 
  aid, new identities in the Witness Protection Program, 
  immunity from prosecution, protection from supernatural 
  foes, etc.), although the majority go unrewarded for their 
  service. Control watches from behind their eyes, monitoring 
  every one of its thralls. Whenever a thrall’s special skills or 
  knowledge (or just their body) is need, they’re activated via 
  the Mark or contacted by a handler.
  The Echoing, Empty Chamber
  The Black Chamber practises strict information security, 
  and makes extensive use of obedience and memory-erasure 
  geases. Low-ranking agents literally know what they need 
  to know and nothing more. Persistent rumours claim that 
  the Dark Mark can cause selective amnesia at the will of 
  Control. The Chamber is highly compartmentalised, and 
  everything is co-ordinated by Control. An employee might 
  work for years in an office without knowing about any 
  of the Chamber’s other facilities. Curiosity is punished as 
  harshly as failure. 
  Power plays are a rarity within the Chamber. In the 
  Laundry, the knives come out when there’s an opening 
  for any management-level job in Administration, but not 
  here. You need some measure of freedom of action to try 
  to outmanoeuvre a rival or a superior, and most Chamber 
  employees are much too tightly constrained to ever make 
  a play. The Chamber’s leadership is well entrenched – the 
  Nazgûl running the show now aren’t going anywhere. 
  The Chamber & Others
  You know the old joke about the 800-lb gorilla sitting where 
  he wants? In this analogy, the gorilla’s invisible. You don’t 
  know where he wants to sit until he squashes you. The OPA 
  operates in such secrecy that it only has to interact with 
  other agencies and factions when it wants something – or 
  when it’s squishing them.
  The Intelligence Community: Technically, the OPA is 
  roughly on the same rank as the CIA, NSA, NRO or any 
  of the other alphabet-soup agencies in the US Intelligence 
  Community. In practise, the OPA rarely engages with its 
  peers, preferring to rely on Marked thralls within those 
  agencies instead of using official channels. If the Chamber 
  wants access to an NRO keyhole satellite, they can request 
  access or just have their mind-controlled puppet in Chantilly 
  give it to them without his superiors knowing about it. Most 
  government agents believe the OPA to be an information 
  clearing-house, responsible for collating data from multiple 
  agencies; only a small few know the OPA’s true purpose, 
  and most of them are thralls anyway.
  The OPA sometimes deigns to co-operate with other 
  agencies, throwing them a bone consisting of remote-
  viewing data or other magical aid in exchange for help. 
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  62
  Where possible, the Chamber likes to absorb the assets of 
  other agencies. For example, if the CIA gives the Chamber 
  access to a source in Iran, then that source and any CIA 
  officers involved in the case will end up sporting matching 
  new tattoos. The Chamber’s the original vampire squid.
  The Laundry: Occult espionage is one of the few fields 
  where the UK still punches well above its weight these days. 
  Thanks to the legacy of the Invisible College and early 
  control of the Dee-Turing Theorem, the Laundry is still 
  one of the premier occult-security agencies in the world. 
  The Laundry’s outmanned, outgunned and outspent several 
  times over by the Black Chamber, but has still managed to 
  stay competitive. Both agencies agree on the dangers of 
  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and both want to see all 
  humanity survive the conjunction (as opposed to selling out 
  the rest of the world to preserve one’s own country). Both 
  are actively researching computational demonology, occult 
  defence systems, and pursuing contracts with alien powers 
  in preparation for the conjunction. 
  In practise, the two agencies are bitter rivals. The Chamber 
  formerly saw the Laundry as a nest of foreign spies, 
  hopelessly compromised, but now regards it as a weak, 
  hide-bound, bureaucratic waste of resources. The Laundry 
  continues to regard the Chamber as a bunch of sinister 
  control freaks who’ve sacrificed their own humanity for 
  power. The Chamber has a much better chance of surviving 
  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, but it’ll be a pyrrhic 
  victory for humanity – instead of having their souls sucked 
  by horrors from beyond, humanity will be devoured by a 
  home-grown horror instead. 
  The Thirteenth Directorate: The Directorate was the 
  Chamber’s main rival for most of the twentieth century. 
  Now that the weakness of the Directorate is evident in 
  the post-Soviet Union landscape, the Chamber’s new goal 
  is to seize control of as many of the Directorate’s old 
  agents and assets as possible. There’s a second Operation 
  Paperclip going on right now in Russia, as OPA agents 
  hunt down and forcibly render ex-Soviet necromancers. 
  The Directorate’s fighting a losing battle against the 
  Chamber, but can’t spare the resources to put up more 
  than a token defence. 
  The Nameless Bureau: Like the rest of the American 
  establishment, the OPA’s quietly worrying about being 
  eclipsed in the new Chinese century. The Nameless Bureau 
  has many of the same problems as the Chamber, only even 
  bigger. It has roughly the same land mass to protect, and 
  while the Chinese population are more secularised than 
  Americans (and more used to the sort of intrusive state 
  control that will become necessary during the Conjunction), 
  there are also an awful lot more of them. In fact, it’s likely 
  that whatever solution works to protect the United States 
  would also work for the People’s Republic. Two men on a 
  doomed plane, and only one parachute... that always ends 
  well.
  The European Agencies: The Chamber dismisses most 
  of the European agencies, correctly, as small and limited 
  in reach. It’s got its tentacles in the Faust Force and the 
  Portugese JPCOG, and can attend Joint Intergovernmental 
  Framework meetings as observers via the Benthic Treaty. 
  Plus, the Chamber sucked Europe dry of useful occult 
  knowledge years ago. The exception is the French DCRI, 
  whose rivalry with the Chamber is just as deep as the 
  Laundry’s, and a lot more violent. Both groups operate 
  an occult foreign legion of bound inhuman assets and 
  defectors. If you quit the Black Chamber and survive, then 
  there’s a place for you in the DCRI and vice versa.
  UKUSA Pact: The Black Chamber has “an excellent 
  working relationship” with the Australian, Canadian and 
  New Zealander occult intelligence groups; it shares research 
  with them, and probably hasn’t subverted all of their field 
  officers yet. Most contacts between the Laundry and the 
  OPA are brokered by the Canadians. There’s a direct phone 
  line for emergencies, but that’s rarely used.
  Rest of  the World: The Chamber’s use of possession 
  and remote control via the Dark Mark gives it unparalleled 
  freedom of action in foreign operations. Inhuman assets 
  can be deployed deniably overseas, and foreign nationals 
  can be turned into reliable agents through the Mark. All 
  the Black Chamber needs is one agent in place, one seed 
  planted in fertile soil; from that one agent, it can grow a 
  whole intelligence apparatus. There are Pashtun goat herders 
  and Kenyan government officials and Serbian gangsters 
  running around wearing the Dark Mark, all reporting to the 
  Chamber.
  BLUE HADES: The Black Chamber is acknowledged 
  to be the biggest and baddest occult power on the 
  planet... as long as you’re talking about humans. BLUE 
  HADES (or KUHOOK, as the Chamber refers to them) 
  is a whole different kettle of aquatic post-technology 
  superbeings. The Black Chamber has always had a much 
  more antagonistic relationship with the Deep Ones than 
  the Laundry, ever since the days of Innsmouth. It signed 
  the Benthic Treaty only under considerable pressure 
  from the other human parties, and still chafes under its 
  restrictions (leading to provocative pranks like JENNIFER 
  MORGUE or the USS Jimmy Carter and its onboard Class 
  Five summoning grid).
  The USA is the only Benthic signatory to regularly run war 
  games and simulations aimed at preparing for a conflict 
  
  63
  with BLUE HADES, suggesting that the Black Chamber is 
  confident of being able to counter the Deep One’s exotic 
  weaponry. (That, or the Chamber thinks stopping some 
  Deep One plot is worth the loss of the entire US Navy 
  plus below the sea-level-plus-20-metres line). During the 
  2008 Azores summit (a meeting attended by all signatories 
  other than the Deep Ones), the DCRI accused the Black 
  Chamber of treating Appendix Two – the list of thou-shalt-
  not-meddle – as a shopping list, and warned that continued 
  research and exploration of those locations could breach 
  the treaty. It’s unknown whether or not the Chamber pulled 
  back, or just became more circumspect about its illegal 
  activities.
  The Dark Mark & Other Bindings
  Learning that an old workmate has taken the Dark Mark—
  signed on as a freelance stringer for the Black Chamber’s mind-
  riders to spy through—is harsh; that he’s done it for the love of  a 
  good woman is all the worse, like a moral bullet to the kneecap.
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  The Dark Mark is the Black Chamber’s ward, warrant card 
  and mark of ownership, all rolled into one. It’s a magical 
  tattoo, inscribed on the employee’s skin using a mix of 
  ink, snake venom and nanoparticles inscribed with runes 
  of binding and command. The ink’s made according to 
  a recipe created by Ben Franklin, who worked with a 
  mysterious expert in dyes to create the formula. The snake 
  venom comes from an unusual breed of poisonous serpent 
  that the Chamber breeds on a secret farm in Caddo County, 
  Oklahoma. 
  As part of the process, employees must sign their name in 
  a huge book bound in human skin. A sizeable minority of 
  Marked individuals have an allergic reaction to the venom, 
  which causes the skin beneath the ward to blacken and 
  partially rot. This does not affect the functioning of the 
  tattoo, but bears an uncomfortably resemblance to the 
  witches’ mark described in some occult books. 
  Once inscribed, the tattoo fades into invisibility, and can 
  only be seen when it’s active, or when viewed using a scrying 
  spell or Tillinghast Resonator. (The Chamber has cloaking 
  spells that cause the tattoo to ‘sink’ into the bearer’s body for 
  undercover work – the tattoo remains present as striations 
  on the underlying muscle or bruising on bones, but can only 
  be detected using detailed MRIs). 
  The Dark Mark grows as the bearer loses more and more of 
  his soul to the Chamber. A new recruit might have a Dark 
  Mark the size of a quarter; a high-ranking employee wears 
  a complex sigil that writhes and moves of its own volition. 
  In addition to tagging the bearer as property of the Black 
  Chamber, the Mark has the following properties:
  •	
  Control 
  Link: 
  The 
  bearer 
  can 
  telepathically 
  communicate with Control, and Control can see through 
  the bearer’s eyes, read his thoughts, or possess his body 
  (see page 56).
  •	
  Warding: The tattoo works like a warding talisman. 
  The strength of the ward depends on the wearer’s 
  Status in the Black Chamber.
  Status % required
  Ward Strength
  15% 
  Level 1
  30% 
  Level 2
  45% 
  Level 3
  60% 
  Level 4
  Unlike a regular ward, the Dark Mark can’t be destroyed 
  – it sucks the bearer’s life force to keep itself going. If a 
  Dark Mark is hit by a spell greater than its level, then its 
  effectiveness temporarily drops by one level. The ward re-
  establishes itself at the rate of one level per hour, and sucks 
  1d4 points of temporary POW damage from the bearer to 
  do so. 
  •	
  Badge	of 	Office:	The Dark Mark identifies the bearer 
  to the Black Chamber’s supernatural watchdogs and 
  security systems. Going in without a Mark means that 
  you’re monster chow.
  •	
  Soul Trap: Death is no escape. When the bearer 
  dies, the tattoo acts as a spiritual containment vessel, 
  preserving the last flickers of consciousness and 
  preventing the soul from dispersing. The Chamber can 
  then bind the trapped soul into a containment vessel. 
  Only complete annihilation of the body at the moment 
  of death (say, by standing next to a nuclear bomb as 
  it goes pop) can release the soul from the Chamber’s 
  bonds.
  The Chamber can, if it chooses, reincarnate the souls of the 
  dead in new bodies (by binding them to cadavers, usually, 
  but the Chamber can create fresh clones using UST.). Only 
  especially valuable agents are granted a new lease of life 
  – most of the dead are left to rot in the infinite darkness 
  of the filing cabinets, bodiless, voiceless and sightless, yet 
  hideously aware. See Death in the Chamber, page 69.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  64
  Bound Demons
  I can sense her succubus now, coiling like a black vortex of  
  emptiness behind her conscious thoughts. There’s nothing human, 
  nothing warm – like death itself, not the small oblivion of  orgasm 
  but its complete antithesis, freezing and vacant, a hunger for life.
  –The Jennifer Morgue
  Not everyone in the Chamber bears the Mark. It only works 
  on humans, and you have to voluntarily sign your soul away. 
  The Chamber has other ways of keeping non-humans in line.
  The traditional method for binding entities to your will is 
  to use a geas. You call up a hoary shoggoth from the vasty 
  deep, and before it slurps your organs out through a straw, 
  you lay a geas upon it and say, “thou shalt not eat my organs, 
  nay, nor those of  any other save those I say it is right and proper 
  to slurp upon.” The shoggoth cannot break this command 
  (as long as the geas holds, that is) – but your command said 
  nothing about ripping you apart limb from limb as long as 
  it doesn’t eat you, so it murders you and continues on its 
  merry way. 
  You can try a more restrictive geas. “Do nothing unless I 
  command it” works, but it’s got its own problems. Firstly, it 
  doesn’t make for useful servants, unless you’re really into 
  extreme micromanagement (“Roll forward! Eat that man in 
  the red shirt! Turn left! Squash that tank!”). Secondly, if you 
  draw the geas too tight, you can inadvertently kill someone. 
  If you say, “do nothing unless I tell to you do it” to a human 
  under a powerful geas, he will turn blue and fall over as the 
  geas overrides his breathing reflex.
  Writing a good geas is like writing a computer program. 
  (Actually, it’s identical – Boolean algebra was conceived as a 
  way to mechanise decision-making). You can bodge together 
  a short-term geas easily by, say, whipping out your warrant 
  card and saying, “I order you to tell me everything you saw last 
  night”, but a long-term geas requires months of planning 
  and design. The Fuller Memorandum, for example, describes 
  the conditions that circumscribe Angleton’s freedom of 
  action. 
  Even the best-designed geas, though, still takes away from 
  the initiative of the subject. For some targets, this is fine 
  – “individual initiative” and “shoggoth” should never 
  go together. For a spy, that’s less than ideal, so the Black 
  Chamber uses riders instead. The rider is a demon that’s 
  geased to watch its host and consume the host’s soul if, 
  in the thing’s judgement, the host acts against the best 
  interest of the Black Chamber. Riders are semi-intelligent 
  beasties, and tend to be frustratingly literal-minded, petty 
  and judgemental. Keeping the thing happy by feeding it 
  regularly loosens its grip a little.
  The binding rite that bonds the summoned exonome to the 
  agent’s soul uses a three-node diagram. Node one contains 
  the asset that’s about to become home sweet home to 
  something ghastly; node two’s the summoning node, with a 
  big silver-inlaid electrically charged highway straight to node 
  one’s soul. Node three is for the asset’s handler, who holds 
  the tokens of power that become the key to the spell. Each 
  handler has their own set of personal tokens – a set of dog 
  tags, a class ring, the skull of their predecessor – that holds 
  their authority over the agent and the bound demon.
  The token also grounds the summoned entity in our 
  reality. If you don’t have the token, you can’t constrain 
  the exonome in a binding circle, or banish it back to the 
  Dungeon Dimensions, which is all rather useful. It’s just 
  embarrassing when an elite assassin can’t cross a line of salt. 
  Human Hosts
  One of the Chamber’s dirty little secrets is that possession 
  can technically rob a human of their human status (and 
  with it, their legal protection and citizenship). After all, if a 
  demon’s got hold of your nervous system, it’s in the driver’s 
  seat, not you. There are thousands of cases of possession 
  in the United States every year. Most are spontaneous cases, 
  where some poor sap thinks the wrong thought or reads the 
  wrong scroll in the back of some musty bookshop or spends 
  too long messing with fractals. Others are deliberate malice 
  
  65
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  (cults and witches, usually). The Black Chamber very rarely 
  punishes human assets by turning them into flesh-suits for 
  demons.
  The Chamber could exorcise victims of possession, but if 
  they’re useful, they’re normally drafted instead. The demon 
  is bound using the same ritual as described above. 
  Living With Your Demon
  So, the Black Chamber’s stuck a demon in your head. Time 
  to get cosy with your soul-eating other half.
  The demon’s Hunger is a characteristic that starts at 2d6. 
  Different circumstances and events cause the demon’s 
  Hunger to rise:
  Going a day without feeding
  +1
  Using the demon's powers
  +Varies
  Attempting to exorcise the demon
  +2d6
  Minor breach of Black Chamber 
  regulations
  +1d4
  Significant breach of Black Chamber 
  regulations
  +1d6
  Major breach of Black Chamber 
  regulations
  +2d6
  Resonances
  +1d4
  A resonance is a place or a circumstance that arouses the 
  demon’s hunger – a graveyard for a death demon, a mirror 
  for a doppleganger and so on. 
  If the demon’s Hunger reaches 20, then it breaks its binding. 
  This will inevitably result in the death of the host in some 
  horrible fashion.
  Hunger can be reduced by feeding the demon. Each time 
  the demon feeds, its Hunger drops by 1d6, to a minimum of 
  1. The demon demands to be fed if an opportunity arises; 
  the host can resist this urge by pitting his POW against the 
  demon’s Hunger on the Resistance Table.
  Succubus: Succubus entities feed on sex and death. You 
  fuck someone, and in the moment of orgasm when the 
  connection is strongest, the demon reaches through your 
  sex and devours your partner’s life. If the succubus can’t 
  have someone else’s soul, it’ll take yours.
  Succubi can tune into mortal thoughts. They primarily 
  use this ability to pick up on a victim’s kinks and desires 
  – demons prefer to skip the foreplay and get right to the 
  sexy soul-sucking – but a skilled host can pick up on useful 
  information from the target’s mind in addition to their desire 
  to be fellated by nuns. Reading a victim’s mind increases 
  the succubus’ Hunger by 1; delving for specific information 
  increases Hunger by 1d6, as the demon gets annoyed by 
  ‘irrelevant’ telepathic contacts. 
  If the binding is broken, the succubus will devour the agent’s 
  soul the next time he has sex. Good luck going celibate – an 
  angry succubus puts your sex drive up to eleven.
  Night Hag: Night Hags feed on dreams. The victim of a 
  night hag suffers from sleep paralysis, as the entity manifests 
  and forces its way into the victim’s unconscious to use his 
  dreamspace as a nest. They’re memetic horrors; in a few 
  years, that dream’s subconscious births will birth a clutch 
  of hags, and they’ll eat his soul like a wasp larva. A Black 
  Chamber agent ridden by a Night Hag can use the creature 
  to explore the dreams of others or paralyse sleepers at 
  the price of 1d4 Hunger. The agent must be within POW 
  kilometres of the target, and be able to visualise or recognise 
  the target somehow. A Class Three ward or a dreamcatcher 
  app can block hag attacks. 
  Working with a Night Hag is exhausting; if the agent uses 
  the hag’s powers, he must make an Endurance roll when he 
  wakes up. If he fails, he’s fatigued for the rest of the day (see 
  the Laundry Files rulebook, page 61).  
  If the binding is broken, the hag murders the agent the next 
  time that he sleeps.
  Doppleganger: Dopplegangers are created when an 
  extradimensional entity uses a human as a template when 
  manifesting in our reality. The doppleganger is a mirror 
  image of the original (right-handed hosts give rise to left-
  handed copies) that appears near the original. A character 
  bound to a doppleganger is haunted by his duplicate. 
  Sometimes, the duplicate may help the original; at other 
  times, it pursues its own inscrutable purposes. 
  The Doppleganger has the same physical characteristics 
  and skills as the original. Its body isn’t quite real – it’s really 
  just a mess of ectoplasm, insect shells, dry leaves and other 
  debris, cloaked in a glamour – but it looks and feels like the 
  real thing. They can appear and disappear at will, assembling 
  bodies out of whatever trash happens to be convenient. 
  Dopplegangers are weirdly obsessed with their originals, 
  and often fixate on some long-buried desire or dream. Your 
  doppleganger might decide that you married the wrong 
  man, and that your current husband must die so you can be 
  with your college boyfriend, or want to turn your home into 
  a temple to some alien god.
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  66
  Agent Bindings
  There’s nothing subtle about the degree of 
  control the Black Chamber exercises over its 
  subjects, or the consequences of error. The 
  Chamber has a secret ruling from the Supreme 
  Court that citizenship rights only apply 
  to human beings. Ramona’s kin are barely 
  able to pass with the aid of a glamour. 
  For failure, the punishment can be special 
  rendition to jurisdictions where the very 
  concept of pain is considered a fascinating 
  research topic by the natives.
  –The Jennifer Morgue 
  Just because they don’t chain your thoughts 
  with a geas doesn’t mean that they don’t 
  exert control. The Chamber has its own 
  Oaths of Sservice and silence, and they are 
  much more restrictive and lethal than those 
  employed by the Laundry. An officer holding a 
  token of power can compel the agent to speak 
  or to stay silent, to act or remain still, 
  or for that matter, to live or die. 
  Breaking Your Oath of Office
  “I don’t work for you anymore, Michael,” 
  Officer Green quavers. “Not this century, 
  you bastard.” He stretches out an arm, lays 
  a hook- like claw on the other side of the 
  illusory shared table; it appears horribly 
  burned. Then he raises his other claw and 
  pulls back his cowl, to reveal a thing of 
  horror.
  The Senior Auditor looks at him evenly. “To 
  betray your oath of office was your decision, 
  not mine.”
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  So, you’ve made a huge mistake. You’ve 
  joined the Black Chamber, and it turns out 
  that you just can’t pull off the black cloak 
  look. You want out. 
  You’ve got two options, and neither of them 
  is appealing.
  Option 1: Break your Oath of Office through 
  sheer will. You’ve got to roll your POW 
  against a strength of 15 + (Status/5) on 
  the Resistance Table. 
  Fail, and you can’t go through with it (but 
  you do lose 1d6 SAN and take 1d6 damage for 
  trying). Succeed, and the oath’s penalty 
  clause kicks in. Test your Luck. If you 
  fail, then the spell kills you outright. 
  If you’re lucky, you just take 6d6 damage 
  and (if you’re still alive) you get to 
  roll three times on the Major Wound table. 
  Magical defenses might protect you from 
  the spiritual backlash, but there are no 
  guarantees. No-one breaks an oath like that 
  and gets away unscathed.
  Option 2: Get someone else to unpick the geas 
  spell. You can’t just exorcise a spell like 
  that away. Magic of that potency gets seared 
  onto your very soul… but you don’t need 
  your whole soul, do you? A skilled arcane 
  surgeon could go in and cut away portions 
  of your selfhood, slicing out memories and 
  emotions and bits of your identity until 
  the geas spell has no purchase to hang on 
  to anymore. The sort of sorcerers with this 
  level of skill and knowledge don’t come 
  cheap – Elias Billington had one on staff, 
  and presumably the Brotherhood of the Black 
  Pharoah had one too, since Iris was able to 
  escape her oath to the Laundry. 
  In this option, the sorcerer subtracts the 
  skill of the caster who put the original 
  geas on you from his own Sorcery or Computer 
  Use (Magic) skill, then makes a roll. If 
  the roll succeeds, then you lose 1d4 points 
  of POW and 1d10 points of SAN, as well as 
  suffering 2d6 damage – but you’re free of 
  your oath. If the sorcerer fails, then you 
  get hit with the penalty clause described 
  above.
  All this applies to Laundry Oaths too. 
  The Laundry may be more friendly than the 
  Black Chamber, but that’s a long way from 
  forgiving.
  
  67
  Dopplegangers ‘feed’ by being allowed access to the 
  original’s life, especially personal relationships. So, letting 
  your shadow-self take your car for the afternoon might 
  reduce its Hunger by 1; letting it sleep with your wife 
  reduces its Hunger by 1d6. Dopplegangers become enraged 
  and murderous (+3d6 Hunger) if the host ever reveals that 
  he has a Doppleganger. 
  Manifesting a Doppleganger costs 1d6 Hunger. The demon 
  hangs around for a single service, like some evil genie, 
  before vanishing again. 
  An unbound doppleganger seeks to murder the original and 
  take his place.
  Death Eater: This nasty things feed on the burst of entropy 
  that comes from the death, especially  sudden, violent ones, 
  of a human being. They’re the most unpleasant entities 
  to be bound to – they sap your emotions and humanity, 
  turning you into a soulless shell over time.
  To feed a Death Eater, you have to be close to a human 
  as they die. Committing the murder yourself works best, 
  but the creatures aren’t picky – being within a few metres is 
  enough if the demon isn’t too hungry. The creatures make 
  for excellent assassins. If the host attacks a human target, he 
  can increase the demon’s Hunger by 1 to increase his damage 
  bonus by one rank. Adding another point of Hunger lets 
  the character apply his damage bonus to a ranged attack. 
  If the Death Eater is unbound, then the host’s in for a 
  Final Destination remake ending in his death. Any failed 
  Luck roll puts the character into potentially lethal peril, no 
  matter what the Luck roll was called for. If the Gamemaster 
  asks for a Luck roll to see if the character has change in his 
  pocket to buy a newspaper, and the character fails, then a 
  car smashes through the window of the newsagents or the 
  character suddenly suffers a heart attack.
  Stalker: Stalker entities are your classic tentacled horrors 
  from beyond the stars. When one of these is bound to a 
  Black Chamber agent, he becomes a disposable asset – all the 
  Chamber handlers need to do is remotely break the binding, 
  and the creature appears to devour both the agent and any 
  bystanders before sublimating off to another dimension. 
  The agent can also temporarily relax the binding, causing the 
  monster to appear and attack anyone nearby. Doing so increases 
  the creature’s Hunger by 1d6. Basically, if you’ve got one of 
  these, you’re a suicide bomber wearing a vest of grenades, but 
  you can chuck a few before the whole vest goes boom. 
  Stalkers can feed themselves, but the host has to, on 
  occasion, let the monster out for ‘walkies.’ The entity feeds by 
  disorganising complex structures, especially living ones. So, 
  if you let the demon kill a few people, or smash something, 
  its Hunger drops. (Since it costs Hunger to summon the 
  monster, the host usually has to let it commit several acts of 
  mayhem before putting Fido back in the box).
  Remote Operations 
  The twenty-first century is the era of drone warfare. 
  Predators and Reapers circle the skies over Pakistan, 
  fighting a war where half the combatants drive home to 
  their families at the end of the work shift. Many of the 
  Chamber’s remote operations run on the same control 
  hardware as a Predator drone.
  In Chamber parlance, a ‘drone’ is any remote-controlled 
  or possessed entity. There’s a difference between remote 
  control or remote possession, although they both come 
  under the rubric of remote ops.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  Back Doors
  “The Black Chamber have been known to forcibly 
  install back doors in the minds of foreign 
  operatives who fall into their hands, turning 
  them into sleeper agents. After your experience 
  in Santa Cruz eleven years ago... we felt it 
  best to take precautions. It’s a standard 
  precaution for all field agents who are tagged 
  for fast-track development.”
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  The Chamber can bypass an Oath of Office in 
  another way, by magically suborning part of the 
  victim’s brain to create a shadow personality. 
  Imagine a tumour, growing inside your brain, 
  one that sends out narrow little tendrils from 
  your cerebellum to all the other parts, linking 
  little knots of damaged tissue together so it 
  can function without the rest of your grey 
  matter. This dodges the Oath of Office because 
  it’s literally a different person that happens 
  to share your brainpan.
  If a foreign agent is captured by the Chamber, 
  they may be unwittingly turned into a double 
  agent. 
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  68
  Remote Control
  In remote control, the operator sits at a console with a 
  screen, a keyboard and a summoning grid with an entry 
  vector aimed right back at him. (Basically, a similar setup to 
  Bob’s Neverwinter Nights rig in Pimpf, only running on a big fat 
  SPARC workstation.) The operator gets access to the drone’s 
  senses, but it’s at one remove – he doesn’t, for example, see 
  through the drone’s eyes directly, but gets a visual impression 
  that’s processed and cleaned up on the workstation. The 
  operator controls the drone with a combination of joystick 
  and keyboard commands, relying on the drone’s own residual 
  motor control impulses to handle the hard bits. It’s like playing 
  a computer game, only you’re controlling a shambling corpse 
  in the real world. A microphone picks up the operator’s 
  speech and relays it to the drone’s speech centres, so the 
  drone can talk in a drooling, slurred fashion. Most drones 
  controlled in this fashion are zombified humans, although the 
  same technique can be applied to anything with a nervous 
  system that can be possessed by an exonome.
  Running a remote operation in this fashion is 
  computationally easy, and doesn’t damage the sanity of 
  the operator. It’s no different to flying a remote-control 
  UAV. The Chamber has hundreds of operator consoles at 
  various Air Force bases around the world, running zombie 
  soldiers on black ops in Africa and the Middle East.
  A remote-operated drone uses the operator’s skills and 
  mental attributes, but all skill tests involving physical 
  movement and co-ordination suffer a -20% penalty. 
  Remote Possession
  This is what Control does when it grabs the body of a 
  Marked thrall. The operator lies on a couch and meditates 
  on the Rune of Kamog while in an active summoning 
  grid. His consciousness then jumps to the drone’s body. 
  Remote Possession gives the controller full access to the 
  drone’s physical abilities and senses, which allows for much 
  finer control. A remote-controlled drone looks drunk and 
  confused, and moves in a jerky, artificial way. A remote-
  possessed drone moves as smoothly as the controlling 
  intellect wishes.
  The downside of remote possession is that the operator’s 
  consciousness is partially housed within the drone for the 
  duration of the possession. This can cause sanity loss (body 
  dysmorphic disorder and other identity disorders are a 
  common side effect) and exposes the operator to hostile 
  magics (like geas spells). It’s also a much more powerful 
  spell, requiring considerably more computing power. 
  A remote-possessed drone uses the operator’s mental 
  characteristics and skills, with the exception of physical 
  skills. Any physical skills (Athletics, Brawl, Climb, Dodge, 
  Fine Manipulation, Grapple, Jump, Listen, Sense, Spot, 
  Swim, Throw, etc.) use the drone’s value or the operator’s 
  value, whichever is better. 
  Possessing a drone costs 0/1d4 SAN (or 1/1d10 SAN the 
  first time a distinctly non-human drone like a shoggoth is 
  used).
  Creating a Drone
  Any creature of sufficient complexity and size (a small bird 
  or rat at minimum, although the Chamber’s research facility 
  at the University of Georgia has had some success in swarm 
  consciousness transfer) can be turned into a drone. If the 
  target’s alive, then it must be tagged with an arcane symbol 
  like the Dark Mark to tie it into the contagion grid. For 
  humans and other sentient creatures, an item of personal 
  significance can also work as a connection.
  If it’s dead, then stick in an animating exonome to make it 
  undead, then tag it.
  Resisting Possession: If the drone’s unwilling to be 
  puppetted, then it can resist by making a POW vs. POW 
  contest against the operator (use the operator’s own POW for 
  a remote possession, or the workstation’s effective POW for 
  remote control). If the drone wins, it resists the remote-control 
  attempt. An especially good roll (winning by 50% or more or 
  rolling a natural 01-05) breaks the connection if it’s not a secure 
  link. For example, a sigil scrawled with indelible marker or a 
  stolen personal item might spontaneously combust. 
  Wards can block possession, and an exorcism or banishment 
  spell can kick the possessing entity out of the host. 
  Playing a Drone Operator
  A player character drone operator should create their 
  operator player character as normal. Drones then get 
  requisitioned like equipment.
  Rotting Zombie
  Easy
  Glamoured Zombie
  Average
  Lobotomised Human
  Average
  Thrall
  Average to Difficult, 
  depending on the Thrall
  Small Animal (rat, cat, bird, 
  small dog)
  Easy
  Medium-sized Animal (guard 
  dog)
  Average
  Inhuman Drone (shoggoth, 
  byakhee)
  Difficult 
  
  69
  Death in the Chamber
  [T]he leftmost of  the wraith-like figures nods, a slight inclination 
  of  the cowl that hints at a skull within. “I am Officer Black. 
  This”—a band of  mist that might conceal a hand, or some other, 
  less human limb, gestures to its right—“is Officer Green. And I 
  have the pleasure of  introducing Patrick O’Donnell, formerly of  
  the Hazard Network, subsequently one of  our freelance informers, 
  now deceased.”
  The phantom limb stretches alarmingly past Officer Green and 
  flips back the hood covering the wreckage of  O’Donnell’s head.
  Lockhart swears very quietly—but not so quietly that he escapes 
  notice.
  Officer Black emits a dry chuckle. “Remember our service motto? 
  ‘Death is no escape.’”
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  Those who bear the Dark Mark are beholden to the Black 
  Chamber even after death. Their souls get trapped by the 
  Mark and transferred to a spiritual detention centre. There, 
  they can be interrogated or consulted when needed, or 
  reincarnated in a new host. 
  If a player character dies, that player should make a Difficult 
  Status check. If successful, the Chamber decides that the 
  character is of sufficient value to incarnate in a new host. 
  Depending on circumstances, the Chamber may choose to 
  grow a clone of the original body, or animate the character’s 
  body as a zombie possessed by his own ghost, or provide a 
  living, but soulless donor body.
  If the Status check fails, then the Chamber keeps the soul 
  on ice, and the character is effectively out of the game. 
  Dead characters aren’t bound by the Dark Mark and can’t have 
  a demon riding shotgun on their souls. The Chamber doesn’t 
  need such safeguards – this second lease on existence can 
  be snatched away by the Dark Commissioners with a single 
  word of power. Any attempt by the dead to betray the Black 
  Chamber means that the character is instantly hurled back 
  into the dark abyss for an eternity of enhanced interrogation. 
  Chamber Assets
  Old stories about the shape of the Pentagon aside, the 
  Chamber has assets across the world. Most of their facilities 
  are anonymous grey offices inside the Washington Beltway 
  in the heart of spook country, but several have become 
  infamous in the occult community. The vast expansion of 
  conventional intelligence gathering since 2001 allowed the 
  Chamber to build dozens of new fortresses across America. 
  When the US has more than fifty intelligence centres 
  or military commands all dedicated to tracking terrorist 
  funding, all filing virtually identical reports that rephrase 
  the same few facts over and over, it’s easy to hide occult 
  operations in plain sight.
  The Dark Tower
  Oh, come on, you knew that name was coming. The 
  Chamber’s new headquarters – built in 1999 – is a monolithic 
  black block surrounded by green carnivorous lawns. It’s got 
  space for more than 20,000 staff on the surface; the vaults 
  and, well, dungeons underneath are even larger. Don’t 
  bother looking for it on Google Earth, as they’ve had it 
  redacted from the maps. Actually, don’t bother looking for 
  it in meatspace either. The whole building is cloaked in an 
  invisibility glamour. 
  Inside, it’s a maze of twisty corridors, all alike – literally. 
  You can only see the office you’re looking for – every other 
  door is unmarked and leads back to the corridor you’re in. 
  Visiting the Dark Tower is a disconcerting experience, as 
  you can see hear the ringing of phones and low murmuring 
  of conversations in adjacent offices, but you just can’t get 
  to them. 
  The same applies to the exit – if you’re not given permission 
  to leave the tower, you’ll wander the labyrinth forever until 
  you starve to death. Some unfortunates have survived for 
  months by camping in washrooms and stealing food from 
  desks at night. 
  The Ranch
  She’s already far enough inside the ranch house that by rights she 
  should be standing with her feet firmly planted in the dirt fifty feet 
  behind it – outside, but that’s not how things work here.
  –The Jennifer Morgue 
  The Ranch looks like a small farmstead in the middle of sun-
  baked nowhere. You could drive past it a hundred times and 
  not realise there was anything out of the ordinary about it. 
  The old man rocking on the porch just keeps on rocking 
  day and night, scanning the dusty horizon with eyes that see 
  more now they’re dead than they ever did when he was alive. 
  Inside, the Ranch houses the Chamber’s archives of occult 
  weapons, techniques and horrors, including live exhibits 
  of everything that the Chamber knows about, and might 
  expect to run into again. It’s the largest example of practical 
  demonology in the world. The Chamber keeps its toys out 
  here in the middle of nowhere in case any of the exhibits 
  ever escape. 
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  70
  Providence Campus
  The spiritual home of the Black Chamber, this old brownstone 
  on Federal Hill is a listed historic building. Officially, it’s home 
  to some of the more obscure civil records; bored tourists 
  wandering around the ground floor never suspect what lurks 
  just a few feet above (or below – it’s built atop a labyrinthine 
  ghoul warren). The building is still in active use by the Black 
  Chamber. So, sometimes, are the tourists. 
  Amhurst Viewing Centre
  The Army revealed the existence of their remote viewing 
  program, Project STARGATE in 1995, claiming that it 
  produced no useful evidence. That was a deliberate leak, 
  designed to take pressure off the Chamber. The Dark 
  Commissioners dislike being dragged into petty matters 
  like national security, and prefer not to have to answer to 
  the secret Congressional Committee on Phenomenological 
  Activities. By discrediting remote viewing in the eyes of 
  some sections of the government and the intelligence 
  services, it was able to avoid petty entanglements with the 
  clueless while preserving its relationship with those who 
  know what’s really going on.
  Unlike the Army’s petty little STARGATE, the Amhurst 
  Remote Viewing centre is a state-of-the-art facility built by 
  the TLA corporation. Viewers scan the contagion-feeds 
  from millions of subjects in real time, channel-surfing across 
  the subconscious of America. The computer automatically 
  filters the data and identifies patterns while smoothing out 
  artefacts. The centre’s power can also be focussed to home 
  in on and enhance weak contagion links; it can lock onto you 
  and scry on you through contagions as weak as the lingering 
  body heat and emotional connection from a handshake.
  The Room
  The Room is an extradimensional space that can be accessed 
  from any Federal building in the United States if you’ve 
  got the authority to summon it. Everyone gets their own 
  instance of the basic Room. It looks like a small, anonymous 
  interview room. It always arrives empty apart from a desk, 
  three chairs, a desktop computer, a telephone and a sinister 
  fern, but it is possible for senior Black Chamber operatives 
  to stash particular items in their instance of the Room; for 
  example, there might always be a gun waiting in the desk 
  drawer, or a copy of the Necronomicon on a shelf.
  Dismissing the Room disconnects it from our reality. If 
  you’ve got the Dark Mark, you can survive this, but you 
  can’t reconnect back to our universe without external help, 
  and calling up someone else’s copy of the Room is tricky. 
  If you don’t have the Dark Mark, and you’re in the Room 
  when it undocks from this universe, you’ll get eaten by the 
  Things Between. 
  Montauk
  The Chamber operated a research facility at Montauk Air 
  Force Station from 1947 until 1987, primarily focussed on 
  summoning and Gate travel. The first men on the moon 
  
  71
  stepped from the concrete floor of Disjunction Room B, 
  deep beneath Long Island, onto the surface of the sea of 
  Tranquillity. The Montauk Big Grid ran from the 1960s 
  until the station was shut down in 1984, and it was the most 
  powerful summoning grid on Earth for most of that period 
  (especially after the Russian grid at Zaozyorsk went boom 
  during a botched attempt to summon the Render of the 
  Veils). 
  In 1977, BLUE HADES lodged an official protest through 
  the Benthic Treaty framework, claiming that the work at 
  Montauk breached Article 6 (the “do not summon anything 
  you cannot put down” clause), and threatened to sink Long 
  Island if the experiments continued. The Black Chamber 
  shut the grid down for two years, during which time they 
  worked with the nearby New London Submarine Base to 
  seed the whole north-eastern seaboard with warding buoys. 
  The grid started up again in 1979, but ran for only a few 
  months before encountering difficulties – the summonings 
  had somehow altered space-time within the base. 
  The Montauk facility became ‘leaky.’ Gates opened and 
  closed randomly, entities filtered through from outside, 
  and computational demonology became both easier and 
  less predictable. Rather than risk another accident, the 
  base was mostly decommissioned, leaving only a skeleton 
  crew in place to continue research and make sure that any 
  incursions are contained. Most of the researchers moved to 
  the Chamber’s new facility in Alaska.
  Gadgets
  Like the Laundry, officers of the Black Chamber can 
  requisition gadgets, equipment, occult items and tactical 
  support as needed. This uses exactly the same rules as 
  described in chapter 11 of the Laundry Files rulebook – 
  roll Status to requisition an item, making up the difference 
  with Mission Budget points if you fail, and dipping into the 
  Departmental Budget if you’re still short. The main difference 
  is that Black Chamber budgets tend to be an awful lot more 
  generous than the Laundry’s penny-pinching. Double the 
  suggested Mission Budgets in a Black Chamber game.
  Common Gadgets
  In addition to the ones listed here, the 
  Black Chamber can replicate virtually any 
  item used by the Laundry. The exceptions 
  are the Erich Zann violins (the Chamber 
  has only one, and it doesn’t leave the 
  Ranch), Personal Panic Buttons (no SCORPION 
  STARE network in the US) and Warrant Cards 
  (that’s what the tattoo is for).
  Ubbo-Sathla Tissue
  Availability: Easy
  Black Chamber only
  Magical healing is a notoriously bad idea. Ubbo-Sathla Tissue 
  (usually referred to as UST) is therefore also a notoriously 
  bad idea. In its natural state, it looks like whitish goo. Slap it 
  on a wound and apply a thaumic field, and the UST merges 
  with the patient’s flesh to heal the damage. It can mimic 
  skin, muscle tissue and even major organs. It’s not quite a 
  miracle cure, though – the replacement flesh is sensitive to 
  magic. It’s an easy avenue to possession, as the nerves are 
  simpler and easier to map, and in especially strong thaumic 
  fields the flesh can even start growing again into strange new 
  patterns. The Chamber keeps tabs on field agents who make 
  excessive use of UST, and retires those that are close to being 
  overwhelmed by their replacement flesh.
  A UST patch heals 2d6 points of damage, or restores any 
  characteristics lost to a Major Wound with the exception 
  of CHA. It takes 10 minutes to heal a point of damage, or 
  thirty minutes to restore a characteristic point. Using a UST 
  patch costs 1/1d6 SAN.
  Gorgonism Trigger
  Availability: Difficult
  Black Chamber only, Certification Required.
  The Chamber continued the research of the Nazi 
  researcher, Professor von Schacter, and can now induce 
  gorgonism in a subject using a combination of brain 
  surgery and medication. After the brain surgery, the subject 
  appears normal and has no unusual abilities, although an 
  MRI will detect unusual scarring and apparent tumours in 
  the cingulate gyrus. Other than occasional migraines and a 
  heightened risk of brain tumours, the “sleeping medusa” 
  does not affect the subject’s health. Once the trigger shot 
  is taken, however, the subject develops gorgonism within 
  four hours. The standard trigger shot looks like an epipen, 
  although the medication can also be ingested in pill form. 
  This artificially induced gorgonism is identical to that of a 
  naturally occurring medusa, complete with basilisk vision 
  and a fatal brain tumour. The Chamber also has techniques 
  for keeping the tumour from growing, prolonging the life 
  of the subject. 
  A character that develops gorgonism has the same abilities 
  and restrictions as a natural medusa (see the Agent’s 
  Handbook, page 95). 
  A character must have Medicine 50% or more to requisition 
  a Gorgon Trigger.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  72
  Basilisk Shades
  Availabilty: Average
  Black Chamber only.
  These black mirror-shades interfere with the quantum 
  tunnelling component of a medusa’s gaze, effectively 
  countering the gorgon effect. If a medusa looks at you 
  through one of these glasses, you’ll feel slightly warm, but 
  won’t be blasted into fiery silicon-rich ashes. If the medusa 
  lowers his shades, boom. An unspecified, but very high 
  proportion of Black Chamber security staff wear these 
  shades.
  Shades of  Night 
  Availability: Easy
  Black Chamber only
  Another mirrorshade magic item, the lenses of these glasses 
  are marked with the Sigil of Al-Hazred. This functions as a 
  Level Two Scrying spell, discerning any glamours or wards 
  active on the target. The Shades of Night also let the wearer 
  see perfectly in the dark. Long-term exposure to the Shades 
  of Night results in the wearer’s eyeballs turning black and 
  rotting away. This does not affect the user’s vision in the 
  slightest as long as he continues to wear the glasses.
  Fear Engines 
  Availability: Average
  Black Chamber only, Certification Required.
  The Chamber benefits hugely from the post-911 fear 
  industry that dominates American culture. A terrified, 
  paranoid populace that accepts intrusive surveillance and 
  security measures is ideally suited for CASE NIGHTMARE 
  GREEN. Over the next five years, the Chamber plans to 
  increase the use of subliminal messaging and emotional 
  glamours in the media, all tailored to different socio-
  economic groups, with an ultimate goal of complete 
  compliance by 2020. Every opposing faction will, by then, 
  be either marginalised, terrified into obedience or too 
  burned-out to resist.
  Fear Engines are portable nodes of  a Level Four 
  Archetype Entanglement. The engine requires a 
  designated “monster,” which is plugged into the engine 
  via a sympathetic link (a blood sample, a photograph, 
  a personal item ete.). The engine associates this target 
  with the archetype of  the Monster, the Big Bad Wolf, the 
  Serial Killer, the Terrorist. 
  Once the geas gets traction, the target is seen by civilians as 
  something horrific and ghastly that must be destroyed. The 
  engine can easily be tuned to trigger a fight response (if you 
  want torch-bearing mobs on the streets) or fear (crowds 
  running in terror when they see the target). Either mode 
  promotes enhanced respect and co-operation with authority.
  In effect, the Fear Engine makes its target into Public 
  Enemy Number One, and triggers hatred of the target in 
  every bystander. Former allies turn against the target, police 
  scour the streets for him, and everyone instinctively fears 
  and hates him. 
  The Engine does have some side benefits, questionable as 
  they are. The Monster archetype is associated with killing, 
  especially the murder of innocents. The spell does make it 
  easier for the target to kill people without being discovered, 
  but each killing makes the Monster more hated and feared, 
  and draws the net closer.
  The Chamber has Fear Engines installed in most airports, 
  ports and other major transit terminals, wired into the No-
  Fly list.
  The power of a Fear Engine effect starts at a rating of 1d4, 
  and grows over time at a rate of 1d4 points per day. This has 
  the following consequences:
  • 
  The target’s Influence score is reduced by the rating x 5%.
  • 
  The target’s Command, Disguise, Fast Talk and 
  Persuade skills are reduced by the rating x 5%.
  • 
  The target’s Hide, Stealth and Brawl scores are increased 
  by the rating x 5%.
  • 
  The target can add the rating to any melee damage 
  attacks.
  • 
  There is a chance equal to the rating x 10% that anyone 
  who sees the target feels strong antipathy towards him.
  • 
  Any attempts to Track or Spot the target have a bonus 
  of the rating x 5%.
  • 
  Any Command or Persuade rolls to convince people 
  to attack the target or help hunt down the target have a 
  bonus of the rating x 10%.
  • 
  Any firearm attacks on the target may add the rating to 
  their damage.
  • 
  The rating increases by 1d4 each time the target kills 
  another human being. The rating decreases by 1d4 
  each time that the target puts himself at risk to act in a 
  selfless or generous manner.
  Certification to operate a Fear Engine requires Command 
  50% or more.
  
  73
  FLAMEGATE Variable-Geometry      
  Ranged Pentacle
  Availability: Truck-mounted model is Average.
   
        Drone-mounted model is Difficult.
  Black Chamber Only, Certification Required.
  FLAMEGATE is the result of work done at the Los Alamos 
  National Laboratory. It’s a big black box containing four 
  lasers, a dozen specially engineered prisms, an occult optic-
  geometry engine, some very clever computers, and a human 
  head and torso harvested from a convicted murderer. The 
  whole assembly can be carried on the back of a pick-up 
  truck, but it’s designed to be mounted on a Predator Drone. 
  Here’s the science bit – FLAMEGATE can scan any surface 
  within range, and map it. It then projects a laser pentacle 
  or other occult geometry onto that surface, automatically 
  compensating for obstacles or uneven sections of the target 
  area. The pentacle’s charged using a second energy-transfer 
  beam that’s shunted into the Dho-Nha curve using the 
  occult optic-geometry engine, with the corpse working as 
  a necromantic gate.
  So, picture the scene. You’re a Black Chamber agent, 
  hunting down a boojum that escaped from the Ranch. 
  You corner it in an alleyway, but you need a protective 
  pentacle to contain it. You could either ask the slavering 
  monster if it wouldn’t mind waiting for twenty minutes 
  while you sketch out a magic symbol in chalk, or you could 
  call in the FLAMEGATE-equipped drone that’s circling 
  overhead. It projects a charged pentacle right on top of 
  the boojum, trapping it. You can then run a banishing 
  app (or, since you’re the Black Chamber, you can drag 
  that boojum home like a hunter who just bagged a deer, 
  then stick it into some poor goon’s head and call him an 
  Unconventional Asset). 
  FLAMEGATE doesn’t just do protective pentacles. It 
  can do any form of 2D magical geometry. Area wards, 
  summoning grids, gates, geasa circles, geist zones – if Dr. 
  Dee could have hiked up his robes and drawn it on the 
  floor, then FLAMEGATE can trace it from 20,000 feet. 
  Chamber troops operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan use 
  FLAMEGATE-equipped drones to fast-summon demons 
  as needed in the field.
  A FLAMEGATE device can instantly project a powerful 
  sigil, reducing the time needed to create certain effects. 
  Even if a spell does not require the drawing of a sigil, the 
  FLAMEGATE can count as a peripheral, giving a +1 POW 
  bonus (see page 134 of the Laundry Files rulebook). 
  Certification for the basic FLAMEGATE requires 
  Computer Use (Magic) 50%. 
  Certification for the drone-mounted model requires both 
  Computer Use (Magic) 50% and Technology Use (Remote 
  Operations) 50%.
  Ring of  Power
  Availability: Average.
  Black Chamber Only.
  A comparatively simple, but powerful little trinket, a Ring 
  of Power is a shiny gold ring. Usually, these are made to 
  resemble a class ring or a military academy ring. Inside, 
  there’s a small gate circuit and a lump of exotic matter 
  from distant Yaddith, where the triumphant dholes writhe 
  and bellow. The Ring augments the user’s magical ability, 
  increasing his INT and POW by 3 points each for the 
  purposes of spellcasting. The downside is that the wearer 
  becomes dependent on the Ring, even addicted to it. If the 
  ring is lost, then the user not only loses the bonus INT and 
  POW, his personal POW drops by 3 until he recovers the 
  Ring. He also loses 1 SAN per day without the ring.
  ICEQUEEN Virus 
  Availability: Difficult.
  Black Chamber Only, Certification Required.
  The existence of ICEQUEEN was confirmed only 
  recently, although it’s believed that the Chamber first 
  deployed it in 2008. Like its conventional counterparts 
  STUXNET and FLAME, ICEQUEEN is a computer 
  virus that targets specific hardware. STUXNET was aimed 
  at Iranian uranium-refining centrifuges, but ICEQUEEN 
  casts a wider network, and targets computers with lots of 
  number-crunching power that’s suited for embarrassingly 
  parallel problems – like plotting certain complex curves. 
  If it gets onto a machine with a lot of fat juicy GPUs, 
  then ICEQUEEN signals home for instructions. It’s got 
  a selection of tools to disable a GPU – it could upload a 
  program that introduces small, but significant errors into 
  any generated curve, so any magic cast using the flawed 
  curve becomes incredibly inefficient. It could fry the GPU, 
  or it could just run a conventional summoning spell and call 
  up something hungry to wreck the joint.
  ICEQUEEN can spread through conventional (USB stick, 
  LAN infection) or occult means. It can be dropped onto 
  a target network by running a contagion spell, assuming 
  you’ve got access to chips made in the same batch as those 
  on the target computer. It also has a geas module – if 
  activated, it flashes an obedience geas on the screen at 
  random intervals. If the user isn’t wearing a ward or some 
  other protection, then the geas compels them to insert a 
  USB stick, get a copy of the virus, then go to the most 
  powerful uninfected machine they know and infect that 
  one too.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  74
  ICEQUEEN infections have shown up on machines 
  in Iran, South Korea, Germany and England (not in the 
  Laundry itself, but in QinetiQ). Laundry analysts believe 
  ICEQUEEN was originally aimed at the Chinese, but 
  the Chamber now uses it to sabotage any computational 
  demonology box they don’t like. The original ICEQUEEN 
  ran on Windows, but the Chamber’s ported part of the code 
  to Linux. It can even zap smartphones. 
  If a computational device is infected with ICEQUEEN, the 
  controlling agent can:
  • 
  Download any information on the computer.
  • 
  Reduce the computer’s POW by 10 points for the 
  purposes of casting spells.
  • 
  Destroy the computer.
  • 
  Cast a summoning spell via the computer.
  ICEQUEEN certification requires Computer Use (Hacking) 
  50%.
  Mindseal Talisman
  He winks at me slowly, then tugs his left ear lobe. He’s wearing an 
  earring that looks a lot like a symbol I see most days at the office 
  on my way past the secure documents store in Dancey House.
  –The Jennifer Morgue
  Availability: Easy (Level Three)
   
        Average (Level Four)
   
        Difficult (Level Five)
  Black Chamber Only.
  Standard issue for any Chamber officers who actually go 
  into the field, as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned 
  SWCIF (sensitive warded compartmented information 
  facility), a Mindseal Talisman gives its wearer complete 
  immunity to telepathy and other psychic info-scarfing 
  techniques. The talisman shields the wearer’s mind while 
  projecting a screen of plausible psychic noise – it’s much 
  better to have a head that seems full of inane notions 
  about local sports teams and your kid’s upset stomach than 
  to be a suspicious blank spot. The Talisman also ensures 
  that the wearer’s thoughts are secure even if something 
  punches past its psychic shields. If this function is active 
  (and it’s set when the talisman is first issued), then the 
  talisman incinerates the wearer’s mind if someone succeeds 
  in reading his thoughts.
  Bullets of  Soul Eating
  Availability: Easy
  Basically banishment rounds for the human soul, these 
  singularly nasty things are hollowpoint slugs engraved 
  with the Sign of Mung and bathed in oil of mistletoe and 
  trimethyl thallium. A character wounded by one of these 
  bullets takes temporary POW damage equal to the Hit 
  Point damage. A character killed by a Soul Eater bullet has 
  his soul utterly destroyed – no coming back as a ghost, no 
  GRAVEDUST, no resurrection spells. Complete and utter 
  annihilation. 
  Waite-Dirac Possession Apparatus
  Availability: Difficult 
  The Waite-Dirac device looks a little like a brass spider 
  and a little like an optician’s testing kit. The Chamber 
  allegedly developed it from notes captured during a police 
  investigation in Arkham in 1928, although some rumours 
  claim it incorporates OLD DREAMER technology found in 
  Australia. The device allows its operator to swap minds with 
  a target, as per remote possession. The big advantage of a 
  Waite-Dirac machine is that it doesn’t need a connection with 
  the target. It works on line-of-sight.  You just point it at a 
  victim, calibrate it (requiring a Technology Use roll and about 
  two minute’s work), press a button, and you swap bodies.
  When the device is activated, the operator must make 
  a Firearms (Exotic) roll to hit with the transfer beam. If 
  successful, the target pits his POW against the machine’s 
  POW of 14 on the Resistance Table. If the machine wins, 
  then the operator gets control of the target’s body for a 
  number of minutes equal to the margin of failure. 
  For example, if the Resistance roll fails by 28, then the 
  operator has control for 28 minutes. If the target wins, then 
  the operator suffers 1d6 points of temporary POW damage 
  from psychic feedback. The machine must be recalibrated 
  after a failed transfer. 
  The machine has a built-in sedative injector that pumps 
  sodium thiopental into the operator’s body after a 
  successful transfer, so the target has only a few seconds of 
  consciousness in the operator’s body before falling asleep. 
  If the drug is not used, then the target gains control of 
  the operator’s body just like the operator has control of the 
  target’s body.
  Repeated use of a Waite-Dirac machine prolongs the 
  transfer time. Multiply the margin of failure by the number 
  of times the operator and host have swapped bodies to 
  determine transfer time. So, if this is the third time that 
  agent Zach has swapped bodies with Laura, and Laura fails 
  her Resistance roll by 20, then Zach has 3x20=60 minutes 
  to play in Laura’s body.
  Any warding spell blocks the transfer. If either body is 
  targeted with a banishing or exorcism spell, or the machine 
  is destroyed, then the effect ends and the minds swap back.
  
  75
  Being the unconsenting target of a mind swap costs 1/1d8 
  Sanity (or more, depending on what your body did while 
  you were asleep). 
  Zombox
  Availability: Easy
  A Zombie Box is a ruggedized bit of electronics kit, 
  consisting of a study container about the size of a packet 
  of cigarettes. Three short needles stick out of the back, 
  along with two sticky strips to hold it in place. On the top, 
  there’s an activation switch. Inside, there’s a contagion link, 
  a summoning grid, some custom-built processors, a little 
  dried blood and a battery. 
  Operating a zombox couldn’t be easier. Stick it into a corpse, 
  ensuring that the needles penetrate the flesh and the sticky 
  strips bond firmly with the skin. Hit the on switch, and the 
  box does the rest. It summons up a lesser demon to animate 
  the corpse as a zombie, then runs a geas spell to keep the 
  zombie under control and open it up to remote control via 
  the contagion link. In short, it turns any corpse you stick 
  it to into a remote controlled drone for a Black Chamber 
  remote operator. 
  The OPA produced tens of thousands of zomboxes during 
  the 1980s for use in foreign wars. Just air-drop a single agent 
  in with a bag of these things, and you can raise up a guerrilla 
  army in no time. 
  Zomboxes are reusable, as long as the battery holds up. If 
  the zombie’s too badly damaged, just pull it off and tape it 
  onto another corpse. 
  Chamber Games
  “The Black Chamber has always relied on non-human assets, 
  hasn’t it? To a much greater extent than any of  the European 
  agencies. But now the great conjunction is beginning, and you’ve 
  got a huge land mass to defend. You’ve also got a population who 
  are geographically dispersed, many of  whom subscribe to frankly 
  implausible religious beliefs that will badly impair their ability to 
  recognize the truth about what is happening. So you’ve got to find 
  a solution to the religious lunatic problem—to people who will 
  mistake the Black Chamber for Satan and his happy helpers—
  and to defending the United States. It’s only natural to look for 
  the biggest stick. And that thing”—her gaze tracks towards the 
  gate—“is the biggest stick that comes to hand. Am I right?”
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  The Black Chamber is a fever-dream of the American 
  security state; it’s an event horizon of black helicopters 
  and sinister conspiracies. They’re the Majestic 12, the Nine 
  Unknown Men, the Men in Black, the Rand Corporation. 
  They’re Herman Kahn with a copy of the Necronomicon 
  and glowing worms in his eyes, the epitome of the 
  Strangelovecraftian nightmare.
  The Chamber represents the road not taken for the 
  Laundry. They’re what happens when you forget to cling 
  to your humanity, and start using the Mythos for your own 
  ends. John Tynes once memorably compared the Cthulhu 
  Mythos to ‘mental plutonium – get too close, and your mind 
  sickens and dies.’ The Black Chamber got too close, and 
  now they’re building nuclear bombs.
  ThE BLACK ChAMBER
  The Black Chamber
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  76
  The Chamber as Antagonists
  The Black Chamber makes excellent antagonists in 
  a Laundry game. It is not a cult, so you can’t wipe them 
  out. They’re not monsters, so you can talk with them and 
  intrigue against them. They’re not the enemy, per se, but you 
  can’t let them win.
  The Chamber works best when it’s kept off-stage as much 
  as possible, but is a constant threat in the background. Put 
  Nazgûl in as undercover agents in cults, have them turn out 
  to be the even-more-sinister backers behind already-sinister 
  schemes, mention them in hushed tones. Impress the players 
  with the size and power of the Chamber; make sure that the 
  players know that they’re the underdogs in this contest. 
  The Chamber’s aims do sometimes match those of the 
  Laundry, but even when both sides are working towards 
  the same goal, don’t let them rely on the Chamber. The 
  Nazgûl are much more likely to let the player characters 
  do the grunt work, then swoop in and take the prize 
  themselves. Keep the Chamber’s ultimate goals ambiguous 
  – never let the players be sure which side the Chamber is 
  actually on. 
  Playing Within The Chamber
  All the above advice applies to games where the player 
  characters are part of the Chamber too. Even if the characters 
  are employees, they shouldn’t completely agree with what 
  the Chamber does. Encourage them to work from within to 
  reform the Chamber, or hint that the Dark Commissioners 
  are mythos-worshipping cultists or even inhuman monsters 
  themselves. A game where the Black Chamber’s approach is 
  the right one contradicts the worldview of the Laundry novels 
  – it suggests a belief not only in American exceptionalism, 
  but in human exceptionalism, that we’re somehow a special 
  case in the universe. 
  Playing	Chamber	Officers
  If you use the Black Chamber as an American version of the 
  Laundry, then it’s best to embrace the Strangelovecraftian 
  weirdness. Run with a mix of player character types – 
  have some play remote operators, have some play demon-
  possessed inhuman assets, have some play field agents – and 
  throw them up against big threats. Everything’s bigger and 
  louder in America. 
  While the Laundry hunts down possessed sheep in a rainy 
  field in Essex, the Black Chamber’s off fighting DEEP 
  SEVEN in the Colorado Mountains, or blowing up large 
  chunks of the Middle East. Go weird, loud, and paranoid 
  – have Control set the player characters against each other, 
  and kill off characters if they fail. Death is no escape, after 
  all.
  Playing Thralls
  The unfortunate fate of Patrick O’Donnell offers an 
  unusual take on a Chamber game. In this set-up, the player 
  characters are stringers and thralls – they might be ordinary 
  people who got caught up in this shadow world, or ex-
  operatives like O’Donnell, or useful pawns for the Chamber. 
  They’ve all got the Dark Mark, but aren’t always working on 
  Chamber business. They might be a bunch of private occult 
  security consultants, or a gang of thieves, or heroic Mythos 
  investigators, or an occult A-Team. 
  Sometimes, the Chamber demands that they carry out a 
  mission. Sometimes, they’re the ones calling on Control for 
  help, but that help always comes at a very high price.
  Playing Undercover Agents
  Finally, you can always have a single Black Chamber agent 
  in a regular campaign. The Chamber has moles everywhere, 
  and the Dark Mark can be hidden. Putting a Chamber spy in 
  a Laundry group means lots of juicy paranoia...
  
  77
  Magic has always been with us, on the fringes of society. 
  Humanity evolved under the pressure of the occult – once 
  our monkey brains achieved a critical mass of complexity, 
  we became a target for every possessor entity and necrovore 
  out there. Our ancestors selected for mathematical inability 
  and a highly restricted state of consciousness – most of 
  those apes who could see things or work magic were 
  beaten to death before the brain-eaters got them. Those 
  few pariahs who survived became shamans and priests 
  and monsters and wizards. Our species thrived despite our 
  intelligence – we learned to shun magic. We put our own 
  fake gods up against the real ones and worshipped glove 
  puppets and genitalia and zombie carpenters instead of 
  Yog-Sothoth.
  All through history, there’s a hidden thread of magic. The 
  same patterns repeat themselves over and over – smart 
  idiots uncover coded references to occult powers, they 
  start experimenting, they make contact with things from 
  outside, and then either get their souls sucked dry or 
  start worshipping those things (and providing sacrifices). 
  There’s also a second pattern, where society turns on those 
  madmen, those deviants, those witches and kills them. The 
  Laundry and other occult agencies are the latest iteration 
  of that pattern. We’re more sophisticated, but we’re still 
  effectively beating Thog with a big stick before he lets the 
  big bad gods into the cave.
  Skip over a few thousand years. In thirteenth century 
  England, there was a monastery where the monks 
  collected books and relics that they locked away in lead-
  lined vaults instead of venerating. (Don’t bother looking 
  for it – all records of it were carefully erased, and there’s 
  a government bunker there now.) With the dissolution of 
  the monasteries, those books passed into the possession 
  of the Crown. A cabal of nobles, all of whom claimed 
  some interest in the occult, asked for permission to study 
  the collection. This cabal were bound to use their magic 
  for the good of the Kingdom, and a stipend was paid out 
  of the Crown coffers to fund their work. A century later, 
  under Elizabeth I, the cabal came under the control of 
  her spymaster, Walsingham. The cabal’s agent at court was 
  John Dee, the original 007. 
  The cabal became known as the Invisible College. Its 
  influence waxed and waned over the years. Charles I 
  feared their power, and instituted the Black Assizes as a 
  check on the college’s influence. Cromwell suppressed 
  the College, driving it underground. It took more than 
  a century for the college to emerge again, hiding behind 
  masks of freemasonry and Rosicrucianism as it searched for 
  members who could wield magic without being corrupted 
  by it. Isaac Newton carried a warrant card, and so did many 
  Before the Laundry
  “The Laundry is stranger and older than you probably realize,” she says quietly. “And the core, the 
  informal group the bureaucrats call Mahogany Row, goes back even further. For hundreds of years they 
  existed, a select band of practitioners of the dark sciences, solitary by nature, funded out of the House of 
  Lords’ black budget.” Howard’s jaw flaps, silently; it’s always amusing to watch their reaction when 
  they learn the truth. “Mahogany Row, the bureaucrats call it. They don’t know the half of it. The larger 
  organization, built from the guts of SOE, was created purely to support the wizards of the invisible 
  college; these days, the civil servants think they’re the real thing. But only because the occupants of those 
  empty offices choose not to disabuse them of such a useful misconception.”
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  BEfORE ThE LAUNDRy
  Before the Laundry
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  78
  other members of the Royal Society. The College recruited 
  from among academics; William Hopkins was the college’s 
  gatekeeper, and paid for his long service with his sanity. 
  The college became an unofficial institution, a club of 
  academics, dilettantes, theologians and sorcerers. 
  The cabal influenced the growth of the British Empire. 
  They collected secrets like magpies, and gathered occult 
  lore from across the world. They discerned terrible patterns 
  in the data – the gods worshipped among the Inuit shared 
  aspects of demons mentioned in legends from the Horn 
  of Africa. The formulae concealed in Egyptian hieroglyphs 
  matched spells cast by wizards in China – and those same 
  formulae came tumbling out of the abstruse calculations of 
  Gauss and Riemann.
  The 1861 Monster Control Act and the secret 1864 
  Contagious Works Act gave the invisible college official 
  standing again, formalising its relationship with the 
  government. By the early twentieth century, the invisible 
  college was a secret but vital part of the British establishment. 
  The original cabal, the college’s Secret Masters, continued to 
  oversee the protection of the Crown, and they employed a 
  number of researchers and agents to help them defend the 
  United Kingdom against supernatural threats. 
  The college suppressed evidence of the occult where 
  it could, and monitored those occult groups it could not 
  control. There was a largely unspoken agreement among 
  the European powers that occult weapons were too 
  terrible to be used in war. (Previously, they’d also been 
  too impractical, but science was rapidly making military 
  wizardry a nightmarish reality).
  After the Great War
  The interbellum period (1918 to 1939) marked the height of 
  the college’s activity. During the 1930s, they used the Mass 
  Observation Project to exhaustively document knowledge 
  of the occult among the general public, and took steps to 
  wipe it out (the knowledge, not the public). The growth of 
  universal primary education across the western world let the 
  governments inculcate a safer worldview, one that wasn’t 
  compatible with magic. Even things that had been relatively 
  common knowledge, like medusa, were driven into the 
  realm of myth.
  After 1939, the college became the Laundry and vanished 
  into the ineffability of Mahogany Row, but back before 
  then there were still giants walking the streets of Mayfair. 
  Coincidentally, this was also the time described by Lovecraft 
  in his fiction, and the era concentrated on by the Call of  
  Cthulhu roleplaying game. Playing a campaign set in the 
  interbellum years combines the attitude and metaphysics 
  of the Laundryverse with the wealth of background 
  information and scenarios available for Call of  Cthulhu.
  Creating Characters
  Follow the normal character creation rules for Laundry 
  player characters, with the following exceptions:
  • 
  There’s no Computer Use skill.
  • 
  • 
  Science (Thaumaturgy) is also unavailable.
  • 
  Status is replaced by Credit Rating. Your character’s 
  initial Credit Rating depends on your Wealth level.
  • 
  Destitute: 0%
  • 
  Poor: 5%
  • 
  Average: 15%
  • 
  Affluent: 30%
  • 
  Wealthy: 60%
   
  Credit Rating can be increased like any other skill.
  • 
  During Step Eight, assign 50 points to any five skills 
  of your choice, and add +10% to your Credit Rating, 
  Knowledge (Occult), Knowledge (Politics), Etiquette 
  and Knowledge (Espionage) skills.
  • 
  During Step Nine, you can learn a number of spells 
  equal to the tens digit of your Sorcery skill. (So, a 
  character with Sorcery 50% knows five spells).
  • 
  Invisible College characters don’t receive the same 
  training as Laundry agents. Their Madness Threshold 
  is 5 or half their POW, whichever is higher.
  
  79
  Instead of working for the Laundry, your characters are 
  agents of the Invisible College. From time to time, you may 
  be called upon to serve King and Country in unlikely ways. 
  Contacts come in the form of written correspondence 
  from the Secret Masters, or by meeting one of the more 
  established agents (see Notable Characters, below). The 
  Invisible College doesn’t have a headquarters (at least, not 
  one that your characters know about), so meetings happen 
  at various clubs and private homes around London.
  Grimoires and Practical Magic
  While the College is on the trail of a unified theory of 
  magic, they’re not quite there yet. Sorcery works somewhat 
  differently in this campaign framework. Instead of a 
  character knowing all the spells permitted by their Sorcery 
  score, spell effects are learned individually. So, you don’t 
  learn one Summoning spell and cast it as level one, two 
  or three – you learn Summon Feeder in the Night, then 
  learn another spell called Summon Fire Vampire and so on 
  (actually, you’re more likely to learn Ye Shade of  the Mortuary 
  & How It May Be Bound To Thy Will). 
  Learning a spell takes 1d6 weeks of study per level of the 
  spell. At the end of this time, the character can make a 
  Sorcery test. If successful, he learns the new spell.
  •	
  Defensive Bindings: Each type of damage is a 
  different spell.
  •	
  Destiny Entanglement: Does not exist in this era as 
  a distinct spell. Some rituals may incorporate elements 
  of the entanglement, but the Invisible College does not 
  yet understand it well enough to make it into a formula.
  •	
  Entropy Manipulation: There are literally hundreds 
  of spells based on Entropy Manipulation, each of 
  which can be studied independently.
  •	
  Exorcism: Unlike other spells, learning Exorcism at 
  level one allows the character to cast it at an arbitrarily 
  higher level. 
  •	
  Gate: Each different destination is a different spell. 
  •	
  Geas: Each different type of Geas (truth, silence, 
  binding, oaths of service and so on) is a different spell.
  •	
  Glamour: Each appearance is a different spell.
  •	
  Prognostication: Only exists as a single spell, although 
  there are lots of different (and equally unreliable) 
  forms.
  •	
  Scrying: Each level is a different spell. 
  •	
  Sympathetic Magic: Each level is a different spell. 
  •	
  Summoning and Banishing: One spell per creature 
  type. And yes, you learn Summoning and Banishing 
  separately.
  •	
  Wards: Each type of ward is a different spell. 
  Without computers, all spells must be cast using Traditional 
  Magic, Pen and Paper, or Mental Magic (see pages 131-132 
  of the Laundry Files Rulebook).
  Magical Items
  Mass-producing magical items requires computers (or 
  invocation of alien minds that don’t get K-Syndrome after 
  recasting the same spell over and over), so the nascent 
  Laundry doesn’t have a huge arsenal of Class Two wards 
  and Hands of Glory. They do have a room in the British 
  Museum where they keep certain items with curious and 
  occasionally useful qualities, and those relics may be 
  assigned to the player characters as needed. 
  Of course, ancient relics and magic fetishes usually lack 
  the ease of use and portability of modern talismans. The 
  Invisible College might issue a character with a ward, but 
  it might take the form of a carved shell marked with runes 
  of binding, and the crustacean inside (a creature that baffles 
  the best minds in the field of Natural History) must be fed 
  on blood regularly. The 1930s version of a thaumometer 
  is a bulky device with crackling electric coils and carefully 
  balanced droplets of mercury in glass tubes; you can carry 
  one in a suitcase if you don’t mind breaking your back. 
  Characters can create their own magic items ahead of 
  time. Enchanting a spell into an item increases the POW 
  requirement by 2 and the casting time by a factor of five. 
  So, to enchant a level 2 ward requires POW16 and 120 turns 
  (10 hours) work.
  Requisitions, Training & Bureaucracy
  Fortunately for the player characters, this is the era before 
  the Invisible College hid itself in a shell of bureaucracy. 
  The characters are not employees – they might be private 
  citizens who are informally called upon to serve, or agents 
  of the intelligence service, or officers in the army. Their 
  work for the invisible college is conducted in secret, as a 
  clandestine adjunct to their normal lives. It’s not a 9-5 job, 
  it’s “by the way, Wingate, while you’re off  suppressing the uprising 
  in Transjordan, would you terribly mind popping into the desert 
  and taking another look for that pesky lost city of  Zerzuza?”
  Characters can use Credit Rating instead of Status to 
  requisition support or equipment, as per the standard 
  rules in Chapter 11 of the Laundry Files rulebook. Mission 
  BEfORE ThE LAUNDRy
  Before the Laundry
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  80
  Personalities of the Interbellum
  Playing a historical game lets the characters 
  rub shoulders with figures from history. 
  Occultism 
  and 
  espionage 
  are 
  traditional 
  occupations of the great British eccentric, 
  and a surprising number of people combined 
  the two. In any game based on the real 
  world, research is your friend. Wikipedia is 
  especially wonderful for this – delve into the 
  background of any historical figure from this 
  era, and you’ll find an aunt who was involved 
  with spiritualism or a mysterious holiday to 
  Egypt or a bibliophilic hobby that you can 
  hang a mystery on. Active during the 30s, 
  you’ve got figures like the following:
  J.F.C. “Boney” Fuller: Later to become ‘F,’ 
  chief of SOE. Fuller retired from the British 
  Army in 1933 to concentrate on his theories 
  on mechanised warfare (his theories on tank 
  warfare were the foundation of the German 
  blitzkrieg), occultism (he was a devotee of 
  Crowley) and far right politics (he strongly 
  sympathised with the Nazis, and was given 
  a choice between running the Laundry and 
  internment when the war began). 
  Claude Dansey: He becomes Assistant Chief 
  of SIS until 1944; he then transfers to the 
  Laundry and becomes instrumental in defining 
  the Laundry’s structure. In the 1930s, he works 
  officially for MI6, but has no confidence in the 
  agency. Instead, he spends the decade building 
  his own intelligence network, codenamed the 
  Z Organisation, which recruits businessmen, 
  industrialists and travellers. Spiteful and 
  often cruel, he has a special dislike for 
  intellectuals and academics, which makes 
  his position in the Invisible College rather 
  awkward. He does, however, have a brilliant 
  deductive mind.
  Ian Fleming: Later to win fame as the creator 
  of James Bond, Fleming was recruited by the 
  Invisible College after dropping out of 
  Sandhurst. (His mother, Evelyn Fleming, is 
  also tangentially associated with the college 
  – what do you expect from a woman whose 
  maiden name is Eve Beatrice St. Croix Rose? 
  Eve, meaning the firstborn of a new age, and 
  Beatrice, who guided Dante to enlightenment, 
  of the Rosy Cross?) During the 30s, Fleming 
  bounced around various failed careers as a 
  journalist, banker and stockbroker before 
  joining Naval Intelligence. These careers 
  provide cover for his work with the Laundry.
  Denis Wheatley: Another Invisible College 
  alumnus who went on to a literary career, Denis 
  Wheatley is already a respected novelist. 
  He’s a valuable consultant and researcher for 
  agents of the College, and he has an extensive 
  secret library of occult tomes. 
  Aleister Crowley: The Societas Rosicruciana 
  in Anglia, a precursor to the better-known 
  Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was one of 
  the Invisible College’s infrequent recruiting 
  fronts. In the modern era, anyone muttering 
  about the Kabbalah or the language of angels 
  or the Rosy Cross is probably a clueless 
  wannabe, as the real occultists are off 
  plotting fractals or arguing about Hilbert 
  spaces. Back then, though, those who knew what 
  they were talking about hid among the ranks 
  of the deluded and delusional. The Secret 
  Masters would occasionally release documents, 
  to see who took an interest. Those who proved 
  intelligent and sceptical enough to separate 
  nonsense from genuine magic would then be 
  recruited to serve the Invisible College. 
   
  Crowley, ‘the Great Beast,’ was also the great 
  failure of the College. He was recruited as an 
  agent, and was assigned to gather intelligence 
  about occult developments across the world. 
  He left the service of the Invisible College 
  in 1930, when he managed to break his Oath of 
  Service using a ritual he conducted in Lisbon, 
  but by ‘34 he was bankrupt and needed the 
  College’s protection again. 
  Crowley should prove a very unreliable ally 
  for the player characters. He’s a talented 
  magician, 
  he 
  has 
  friends 
  and 
  devotees 
  everywhere, and he’s undeniably brilliant. 
  However, he’s also a drug addict, a sex addict 
  and an egotist, and delights in controversy 
  and dramatic confrontations. 
  The Schoolmaster: In 1929, J.F.C. Fuller and 
  several other members of the college successful 
  bound a hungry ghost, codenamed TEAPOT, into 
  the body of a condemned murder. They bound 
  the creature with a powerful geas spell, and 
  hid it in a public school as a mathematics 
  teacher. The TEAPOT entity is still there, 
  terrifying schoolboys and behaving like an 
  ordinary Englishman, revealing few signs 
  of the soul-eater sewn into its flesh. In a 
  few decades, TEAPOT will be known as James 
  Angleton, but in the 1930s it’s an untested 
  weapon in the Laundry’s arsenal.
  
  81
  budgets still exist, representing the informal sanction of 
  the Invisible College. Characters can exceed their Mission 
  Budget and draw further on the goodwill of the College and 
  its allies, this works like drawing on a Departmental Budget, 
  but the punishments for doing so are much, much more 
  severe, as the character risks bringing the Invisible College 
  into the public eye. Double the Status Loss described in End 
  of  Mission Accounting on page 108 of the rulebook and 
  apply the loss to Credit Rating instead. Cross the college, 
  and it will ruin your reputation or drive you mad.
  Training still exists, but as an informal correspondence 
  course between the characters and the Secret Masters. 
  If the characters perform adequately on a mission, the 
  Gamesmaster may reward them with a letter from a PO 
  Box in London containing a handwritten treatise on some 
  obscure topic that grants a check in one or more skills.
  Threats & Dangers
  The College’s seers have foreseen a second war, more 
  terrible than the last. Both the English and their German 
  counterparts prepare for an occult struggle. Agents of 
  the Ahnenerbe and the Thule society explore the world, 
  collecting relics and spells. They’re already on the trail of 
  computational demonology, and their research will lead to 
  the Wannsee conference and Hitler’s doomsday weapon of 
  Project Jotunheim. The war is still a few years away, but 
  the player characters will run into plenty of Nazi spies and 
  sorcerers.
  The Gamemaster can also draw from Lovecraft. Stories like 
  At The Mountains of  Madness, The Haunter of  the Dark, The 
  Shadow Out of  Time and several other tales take place in 
  this era, and are a fecund source of inspiration. A partial 
  conjunction in 1925 between our world and Outside 
  (recorded by Lovecraft as The Call of  Cthulhu) stirs up cult 
  activity and Mythos worship across the world. 
  The Wizards of Mahogany Row
  In a present-day Laundry Files campaign, 
  the player characters should never meet 
  the Secret Masters (or the Board, as 
  they’re known now) in person. They don’t 
  have bodies anymore, at least not as we 
  know them. They may still communicate with 
  the characters on rare occasions through 
  unlikely channels. A character might get 
  a typed memo signed with a simple ‘F,’ or 
  one of the Residual Human Resources could 
  suddenly offer erudite advice at just the 
  right moment. The Board also communicates 
  by possessing Laundry agents (what, you 
  thought only the Black Chamber could play 
  those games) or through prophetic dreams.
  These communications become more frequent 
  during the Phoney War. It’s almost as if 
  the Board desperately tries to tie up all 
  their loose ends before it’s too late.
  BEfORE ThE LAUNDRy
  Before the Laundry
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  82
  The Phoney War refers to the period just before the end of 
  the world as we know it. It’s the time just after the lock on 
  the gates of Hell opens, but just before the demons push 
  the gates open from the far side. Think of it as injury time 
  in the Great Game.
  In your Laundry Files campaign, the Phoney War happens 
  once you’ve pressed a Big Red Button (see page 40). The 
  Stars are now coming Right, and nothing can stop it. In a few 
  short weeks/months/years (delete as appropriate), reality is 
  going to melt in the terrible presence of the risen Great 
  Old Ones. Life may seem to continue as normal during the 
  Phoney War, but that’s only a desperate pretense. Even if 
  you’re an ordinary clueless civilian who knows nothing about 
  the Cthulhu Mythos or CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, 
  you’ll instinctively know that something’s going wrong.
  As the world moves towards the end times, there’ll be all 
  sorts of signs and portents. Here are a few to look for:
  Weird Weather
  As our reality becomes porous, microscopic leaks between 
  universes shunt energy and information back and forth. 
  On a macro level, the biggest manifestation of this is weird 
  weather. There’ll be more heatwaves and snowstorms, 
  especially unseasonable ones, lots more electrical storms, 
  more earthquakes and other seismic activity – more natural 
  disasters in general. These effects will be especially intense 
  around certain days that are outside the natural cycle of 
  time. Walpurgisnatch (May 1st), Pentecost (varies) All 
  Hallows’ Eve (October 31st) and the periods around the 
  solstices are especially vulnerable. 
  Fortean enthusiasts will have a field day – we can look 
  forward to rains of fish, blood, space jelly and all sorts of 
  cosmic debris. More alarmingly, there’ll be a steep rise in 
  cosmic radiation penetrating the atmosphere, accompanied 
  by a noticeable jump in skin cancers. 
  Uncanny Events
  The wheels are coming off the bus. The Herald of the 
  End Times won’t be a trumpet blast; it’ll be in the funny 
  pages. Expect spontaneous combustions, earth-lights, 
  unexplainable co-incidences, mysterious disappearances, 
  two-headed goats chanting the Unspeakable Names, Cthulhu 
  appearing in tortillas and other weird shit. Hauntings will 
  spike, too, as all of the extra thaumic energy sloshing around 
  takes form from psychic echoes and stone tapes. 
  Official	Paralysis	&	Corruption
  The world’s governments have known about CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN for years, but most people still 
  don’t believe the reports. It’s hard to look out at the sane, 
  stable world you’ve known all your life and then reconcile 
  that with alien space gods descending to eat our brains. It’s 
  unthinkable.
  During the Phoney War, we’ll have to deal with the 
  governmental equivalent of shock. Some parts of the 
  establishment will fall back on the reflexes and training 
  we’ve inculcated into them over the last few decades, but 
  other sections will just grind to a halt or get bogged down in 
  pointless habits. Expect lots of failed summits, empty sabre-
  rattling, unusually stupid policy-making and widespread 
  denial. Most of the systems in place right now won’t be able 
  to cope with the coming disaster. All-out thermonuclear 
  war was simple in comparison.
  As existing institutions founder, expect others to take 
  advantage of the situation. More wars, more whole-scale 
  looting of economies, more flouting of regulations. In any 
  war, thieves and arms dealers thrive at the start of hostilities.
  Increased Security
  Not so much a symptom as a reaction, and part of the 
  treatment. Even the best-case scenarios for the next few 
  years aren’t pleasant ones. An invasion of brain-eaters 
  means that the entire civilian population must be treated 
  as potential fifth columnists. Anyone outside a warded 
  zone could become a vector for possession. While the real 
  fireworks won’t start until the Great Old Ones arrive, the 
  Phoney War is when we roll out our totalitarian security 
  networks. The UK’s actually ahead of the curve here, with 
  SCORPION STARE and national ID cards. We can also 
  expect more security checks on travellers, under the guise 
  of the War on Terror.
  The Phoney War
  “We go home.” Her voice is tired. “We conduct the post mortem. Then we dig in for the phony war.” 
  “Ah.” His eyebrows rise with enlightenment. “You think it’s going that way?” 
  “I am certain of it.”
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  
  83
  Madness
  There’s going to be an epidemic of  dementia—not mad cow disease, 
  new variant CJD, but something our house doctors call Krantzberg 
  syndrome: if  a sorcerer unintentionally thinks the wrong thoughts, 
  per- forms magic by mind, the listeners and feeders and actors they 
  invoke from the quantum foam take tiny bites out of  their brains. 
  Dream the wrong dreams, and you can wake up with a palsy or 
  an aneurysm.
  There will be amazement and miracles, too. Magic wands stuffed 
  with silicon chips that work wonders. Twisted biological creations 
  that obey our directives. Ordinary people discovering they have the 
  power to summon demons and angels and warp reality to their 
  will. Somnolent sentient species rising from the deeps to take an 
  interest in the suddenly interesting land-dwelling aboriginals. 
  Alien emissaries, and powers beyond our comprehension like the 
  Sleeper in the Pyramid – Monstrous conquerors no bullet or atom 
  bomb can kill – and their willing servants.
  –The Apocalypse Codex
  Incidence of all forms of mental illness can be expected to 
  rise steeply during the Phoney War. Five factors will become 
  especially problematic:
  •	
  Pre-K-Syndrome and Psychic Contacts: The 
  threshold for psychic potential will dip as the Great Old 
  Ones return. Those who had the occasional glimpse 
  of the future or who were just generically ‘lucky’ 
  may become full-blown psychics; others who were 
  previously slightly sensitive will move into the danger 
  zone. They’ll be at high risk for possession (see below), 
  but even those who aren’t fully possessed may still have 
  brush contacts with exonomic entities. This means 
  more cases of K-Syndrome and more spontaneous 
  revelations of cosmic horror. 
  •	
  Dream Visions: The human mind is especially 
  vulnerable when dreaming, as the subconscious is 
  better at pattern-matching than the conscious mind. 
  We project a large number of cases where a sleeping 
  individual makes fleeting contact with a Great Old 
  One, leading to mental collapse or shock.
  •	
  Psychic Pressure: Insomnia, stress, anxiety, depression, 
  all boosted by the inescapable feeling of impending 
  doom. 
  •	
  Collapse of  Existing Support Mechanisms: As 
  mental health services and support networks become 
  overloaded, cases that would previously be successfully 
  caught and treated become acute.
  •	
  Adaptation: The upcoming conjunction is a big one, 
  but it’s not the first time that the Great Old Ones 
  have awoken. There were smaller conjunctions before 
  recorded history, and we survived those ones. An 
  unknown percentage of the population will respond 
  instinctively to the collapse of reality, adopting modes 
  of behaviour that seem irrational to those of us who 
  cling to our current frame of reference. We have no 
  idea what form this adaptation will take, but it may be 
  indistinguishable from cult worship of the invaders. 
  ThE PhONEy WAR
  The Phoney War
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  84
  Enhanced Magic
  The full Conjunction is expected to massively increase our 
  magical firepower, but there will be spikes of thaumic energy 
  throughout the Phoney War. Spells will become easier to 
  cast at times, and contact with previously inaccessible 
  regions of the multiverse will become achievable. 
  In game terms, the POW available for all spells increases 
  by +1, and there’s an additional +1 POW available when 
  drawing on thaumic resonance.
  Increased Cult Activity
  This one’s easy – every Mythos cult in the world has 
  their own version of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN 
  eschatology. Their gods are coming back, and they’ll be 
  rolling their respective welcome mats out. Cults that were 
  previously dormant will reactivate; active cults find their 
  magical power (and with it, their ability to recruit more 
  members) increasing. We may also see a swing back towards 
  various forms of organised religion.
  Projections also show an increase in spontaneous 
  development of cults. Humans are hard-wired to worship 
  what we interpret as stronger apes and higher powers. As 
  the crisis grows, more people will turn to the alien powers 
  in a misguided search for safety or meaning.
  Spontaneous Possessions
  As magic in general becomes more powerful, the likelihood 
  of entities either slipping through spontaneous Gates, or 
  else sensing movement in the platonic realm and homing 
  in on human thoughts rises. We can expect more cases of 
  spontaneous possession throughout the UK. Most of these 
  will be low-level entities that can only control one victim at 
  a time; multiple-body possessors get to wait until the main 
  event. 
  Old Ones Awake
  Imagine the ab-reality of the Great Old Ones as a sea that 
  rises and falls with the tides. We evolved in the damp spot 
  on the beach left by the retreating sea, but now the waves 
  are rising again and we’re going to be drowned. We share 
  this patch of beach with strange things left behind by the 
  sea. They look dead and dried out, but when the sea comes 
  back, they’ll stir back to life. 
  These stranded entities can’t survive under the conditions 
  of our reality. They’ve calcified – they might be frozen as 
  patterns of information, or fossilised into stone, or slumber 
  deep underground, or they’ve gone native and disguised 
  themselves as hairless apes. As the Stars Come Right, they’ll 
  live again, the advance guard of the apocalypse.
   
  The Laundry & The Phoney War
  When CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN finally hits, the 
  Laundry will effectively become the British government. All 
  those layers of pointless bureaucracy, all those clerks and 
  administrators who know about alien horrors, but spend 
  their days counting paperclips and arguing over cabling 
  requirements – their destiny awaits them, when they march 
  on Whitehall and ensure that the machinery of state endures 
  even the apocalypse. During the Phoney War period, the 
  Laundry stirs and stretches forth its tentacles, awakening 
  like a papier-mâché copy of a Great Old One made from 
  forms and three-ring binders. 
  Firstly, those bureaucrats need cross-training and upskilling. 
  Bob got a taste of that when he was sent off to the 
  National School of Government, and he’s not the only 
  employee on that list. By the time the conjunction hits, the 
  UK government will have defence in depth in bureaucratic 
  terms at least. Someone has to try to keep the lights on. 
  What does that mean during the Phoney War? More work, 
  as half of the staff is off on training courses or meetings 
  with other government departments.
  Second, those officers who are marked for field work and 
  command, the Line officers, they get a lot more responsibility 
  and power. All those years hunting cultists in Berkshire and 
  
  85
  exorcising ghosts in Wigan? Those were training for the 
  real work to come. The Laundry needs every field-qualified 
  agent to be at the top of their game, as they’re going to 
  be on the front lines when the war for humanity’s survival 
  kicks off.
  (Of course, it’s not going to be a war in the early stages. 
  It’ll be more like an epidemic, a plague, as monsters ooze 
  through cracks in reality and seize our bodies. Those field 
  officers will be plague doctors, the guys sent in to seal the 
  breaches and to burn the still-moving bodies. Later, during 
  the height of the conjunction, it’ll be a shooting war – 
  and a wizard’s war – fought with banishing rounds and 
  EMERALD JAVELIN and SCORPION STARE and who 
  knows what else.)
  Third, the Laundry moves to proactive recruitment. Up 
  until now, with a few key exceptions, the Laundry gets 
  most new staff as a result of field operations. Mr. Smith 
  sees a BLUE HADES while out swimming, and next week 
  Mr. Smith starts his exciting new career in Catering. During 
  the Phoney War, the Laundry goes hunting. For some of 
  the targets, it’s for their own protection – it’s better for 
  Ms. Chandrarti the mathematics researcher to be inside 
  the (warded) tent, instead of accidentally summoning 
  Nyarlathotep unawares. Others get recruited because the 
  Laundry actively needs their particular skillsets, and it 
  won’t take no for an answer. Such targets include existing 
  occult investigators, those with military training, criminals, 
  independent sorcerers and so on will also be co-opted. 
  Many will end up as External Assets.
  Fourth, it’s time to clean house. Previously, due to lack of 
  resources (and other factors), the Laundry monitored some 
  potential cults instead of rolling them up. That policy ends 
  during the Phoney War. Previously, the Solomon Birchwood 
  society was a bunch of fringe scholars studying the works 
  of a discredited eighteenth century philosopher, but once 
  magic starts to rise, they become a danger to national security. 
  As the walls grow thinner, magic becomes easier. The same 
  housecleaning goes for non-human entities – sorry, Mr. S., 
  who lives alone in a strangely slanted house, and buys only 
  frozen mice from the pet store, but your time is up. 
  Fifth, this is when the stakes go up in the game played 
  between the OCCINTEL agencies. The Laundry has to 
  know what the other players are planning. There are three 
  possibilities. A rival agency might be doing the same thing 
  as the Laundry, building up its defences and preparing for 
  the worst, in which case the Laundry needs to co-ordinate 
  with its efforts and minimise the number of cracks that 
  horrors could slip through. The second possibility is that 
  the rival agency is on the trail of some method or relic that 
  increases its chances of survival while damaging those of 
  the Laundry, in which case Mahogany Row makes the call 
  about the Laundry’s response. The classic example here 
  is the Black Chamber and their policy of capturing and 
  repurposing alien horrors as living weapons. 
  Possibility three, of course, is that the rival intelligence 
  agency has fallen to the enemy, and is now run by Mythos-
  worshipping cultists. The time to confirm scenario two or 
  scenario three is during the Phoney War. It won’t do us 
  much good to know the French DCRI is full of madmen 
  (well, the wrong sort of madmen) when Cthulhu’s slouching 
  towards the Channel in a beret. During the Phoney War, 
  everyone – even our European partners – starts checking up 
  on everyone else through both official and covert channels. 
  Sixth... well, if there’s anything on your bucket list, anything 
  you’ve always wanted to do, or anything you need to say to 
  loved ones, now’s the time. 
  Equipment Upgrades
  Along with the enhanced magical conditions, 
  the Phoney War period brings some much-
  needed upgrades to the Laundry’s arsenal.
  • 
  Necronomiphone 
  S: 
  The 
  newest 
  model 
  Necronomiphone S runs off the latest iPhone 
  or Android-OS hardware (yes, porting 
  OFCUT to two platforms is a pain, but it’s 
  easier than trying to convince certain 
  people to part with their shinies), and 
  runs the level two versions of entropy 
  manipulation, exorcism and banishing as 
  well as standard level one versions of 
  all apps).
  • 
  Necrominipad 
  (Average, 
  Certification 
  required): A tablet-sized Necronomiphone, 
  running level two versions of all apps. 
  Plus, it’s great for reading grimoires.
  • 
  Basilisk Guns: The old Basilisk Gun 
  consisted of two video cameras taped 
  together with a custom circuit board. 
  It was bulky, prone to failure and very 
  hard to conceal (plus, it ate battery 
  power like crazy.) New-model stoner guns 
  consist of a handheld 3D digital camera 
  with custom firmware. It looks like a 
  geeky tourist’s toy, but spews look-to-
  kill atomic death up to 80 times at a 
  range of 100 meters on a single battery 
  charge.
  • 
  Wards: Class Three wards are now Average 
  difficulty to requisition.
  ThE PhONEy WAR
  The Phoney War
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  86
  These days, the British government has a rather awkward 
  relationship with faith. Public displays of religious fervour are 
  seen as, well, a little odd. No-one was that happy when Tony 
  said he talked to God about invading Iraq; the consensus in 
  Whitehall was that if the PM had to talk to a spin doctor, he 
  might have gone to a reputable one. Similarly, while the Tories 
  like to be seen as traditional and as quintessentially English as 
  a Turner painting, or cricket, or Jack the Ripper, they try to 
  keep the good old Church of England off to one side – an 
  optional extra instead of something inherent. Freedom of 
  religion, multiculturalism, everyone has a part to play in the 
  rich tapestry that is modern England.
  And if one of those churches is happy to stay low-key, while 
  also investing millions in non-profit schools, why, even the 
  most sceptical chap must admit that religion isn’t all bad.
  If you follow the money, then you can trace the connections 
  between the Golden Promise Ministry and the Washlamb 
  Trust academies. They’re private schools, owned and funded 
  by a holding company that’s part of the Golden Promise 
  group. Washlamb operates three academies in England. 
  Two of them are exclusive, but relatively innocuous schools; 
  most of the students there are the children of Golden 
  Promise members. Exam results are excellent, discipline is 
  strict, and religious education classes are... interesting, but 
  they’re almost exactly what they seem.1
  The Third Academy
  The Third Washlamb Academy is the one that got 
  highlighted in all the meetings and prayer breakfasts with 
  the government. Academy #3 isn’t for the children of cult 
  members or rich families who want little Eustace to have 
  a spot of discipline – it’s for problem children. It takes in 
  kids with behavioural and social problems from across the 
  south of England – the ones who got kicked out of every 
  comprehensive school – and gives them the best education 
  possible, for free. 
  Studiously avoiding any dental exams of this equine present, 
  the Department of Education never looked too closely 
  at the entrance criteria for the Academy. If it had, then it 
  would have noticed that some of the questions asked of 
  prospective students are rather odd:
  “Have you ever dreamed about something happening, and then it 
  comes true?”
  “Have you ever stared at a spider or a fly or some other small 
  animal, and it died?”
  “Do you ever hear the thoughts of  people around you? What am 
  I thinking right now?”
  “Did you have strange dreams around the 30th of  April or the 
  1st of  May?”
  Some humans are more sensitive than others. There’s 
  a crack in their minds, and visions from Outside leak in. 
  In centuries past, they’d become saints or madmen or 
  prophets. These days, they’re more likely to be diagnosed as 
  schizophrenic and dosed with olanzapine. The development 
  of these psychic gifts usually happens in early adolescence, 
  and usually leads to other behavioural problems.
  So, the Washlamb Trust collects potentially psychic kids 
  from across the south of England and sticks them in an 
  occult hothouse that’s disguised as a faith school – and 
  they’re doing it right under the Laundry’s nose.
  The Russian Connection
  The star pupil of the Washlamb Academy’s esoteric program 
  is a young woman named Zoë Waters. The Washlamb Trust 
  believes that she was the child of cultists who ended up in 
  an English foster home, and that she’s got a psychic hotline 
  to the Sleeper. They’re mostly right. They’re just missing 
  one small detail – she’s a Thirteenth Directorate asset. The 
  Russian occult intelligence group planted her as a tethered 
  goat, knowing that one cult or another would pick her up. 
  They didn’t expect that cult to be a bunch of American 
  bible-thumpers, but they rolled with it. 
  Timing
  If this adventure takes place before the events of The 
  Apocalypse Codex, then the player characters’ investigation 
  may be what prompts Lockhart to send Persephone to 
  investigate Golden Promise Ministry’s connection to the 
  British government. If it’s after the novel, then the Golden 
  Promise organisation is on the ropes and desperately needs 
  a way to contact the Sleeper now that Raymond Schiller is 
  gone. Zoë becomes even more important in this scenario.
  And, obviously, if your games take place in a parallel 
  universe to those of the Laundry Files novels, you don’t 
  need to worry about when all this happens.
  Think of the Children
  1. Of course, Golden Promise kids also attend the special Sunday School lessons, where they learn how Jesus will only come when he can no longer ignore 
  the suffering billions of humanity, and how we must all open our hearts and minds to His hungers.
  
  87
  1. The Break-In
  This opening scene targets the family of one of the player 
  characters. If a character has already established a few family 
  members as non-player characters, use them. Otherwise, have 
  the player come up with details on the fly. Tell the player that 
  his character gets an unexpected call from a family member, 
  and ask the player to expand on who that family member is. 
  A brother? A sister? A parent? Friendly or estranged? Married 
  with kids, single, divorced? The two constraints are that the 
  family member has to be living in or near London, and the 
  family member doesn’t know about the Laundry. As far as 
  they’re concerned, the player character works for the NHS or 
  some other forgettable government department.
  The Call
  It’s a brief phone call to the character’s personal phone. The 
  family member is obviously terrified, and sounds like they’re 
  hiding while making the call from the way they whisper 
  into the microphone. Between the breathless gasps and the 
  sobbing, the character can make out the following:
  • 
  Some strange young man just broke into the house. His 
  name is David. 
  • 
  He demanded to talk to the player character, and kept 
  saying something about “the laundry.”
  • 
  David’s scary. Even if the family member is a big tough 
  ex-marine, then they’re terrified of this David. He’s 
  done something terrible that the family member is too 
  alarmed to describe, but it’s obviously ghastly. 
  • 
  David’s got a knife, and he’s dangerous.
  • 
  Then, before the character can ask any questions, 
  there’s the sound of a struggle and the line goes dead. 
  Sanity Loss for hearing a family member in that much 
  distress is 1/1d4.
  • 
  A successful Idea or Knowledge (Occult) roll suggests 
  that there’s got to be a supernatural component to this. 
  It’s got that stench.
  Call the Cops!
  Instead of going to the family member’s 
  home themselves, the characters can call 
  the regular police, or call the Switchboard 
  and have the Laundry send round a plumbing 
  team. If the characters choose the police, 
  then the cops get there too late – by then, 
  David has erected a basic anti-intruder 
  ward, preventing the cops from getting 
  in. He sacrifices the family member and any 
  other bystanders, then kills himself.
  If they go for a Plumbing approach, then 
  they’ve got to pay for it out of their 
  Departmental Budget, although given the 
  circumstances, the Laundry will be lenient 
  (+20% to Status when rolling to determine 
  how big a hole the character blows in the 
  budget). By the time the characters arrive, 
  the Plumbers have done their job. The 
  house is clean, there’s no blood on the 
  floors, and the family member has had their 
  memory erased. The only weirdness is the 
  dead body of David on the floor. He’s got a 
  bullet hole in his forehead and a knife in 
  his hand. The family member and any other 
  bystanders have been geased by the Plumbers 
  not to notice or acknowledge the corpse in 
  any way.
  House of  Horrors
  This section assumes that the family member lives in a semi-
  detached house in suburbia. Adjust as necessary to match 
  the player’s descriptions of their family member’s home.
  Something blasted the front door off its hinges; it looks 
  like a train hit it, but a successful Spot roll notices a magical 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  88
  rune scrawled on the floor in front of it. Just inside the 
  door is a strand of something pinkish-red and slimy. A 
  close examination shows that it’s a length of viscera – it’s 
  something’s gut. (If the family member had a pet, then David 
  repurposed it as a warding spell. If not…well, that family 
  member didn’t need all of their intestines.) It’s arranged to 
  form part of the perimeter geometry for a warding spell. 
  It’s a level one spell, so the characters can easily exorcise it 
  or pick it apart, but it stops anyone from passing it without 
  first matching POW against its POW of 16. 
  Inside, the characters find a scene of horror. David’s 
  pushed the couch into the centre of the room. He removed 
  all the cushions, then forced the family member to lie on 
  the bare couch, and finally placed the cushions back on 
  top – entombing the family member in a plush coffin. He’s 
  scrawled more symbols on the cushions in his own blood.
  David’s a fattish young man of about seventeen or eighteen. 
  He’s dressed in a blood-stained white t-shirt and black 
  combats, and he’s wearing very shiny black shoes. More 
  importantly, he’s got a kitchen knife in one hand; his other 
  hand is covered in a lot of blood, and it’s not all his. 
  His eyes glow from within, and the blood that drips from 
  a dozen long shallow cuts on his left hand and forearm 
  steams and hisses when it hits the ground. Thaumometers 
  click rapidly when pointed at him – he’s magically hot.
  David Philpott
  Two years ago, David was a teenage monster. 
  His violent behaviour and strange mood 
  swings threatened to destroy his family, 
  and he spent his nights running riot with 
  a gang of other feral youths. The Washlamb 
  Trust identified him as a potential psychic, 
  and arranged for him to attend the school. 
  As far as his parents are concerned, the 
  Academy has transformed David into a model 
  citizen – every time they visit him, they’re 
  impressed by how polite and stable he seems.
  The Academy did transform David, but not in 
  the way that his parents hoped. Through a 
  regimen of occult instruction, psychotropic 
  medication and ritual abuse, they turned him 
  into a psychic receptacle for the dreams of 
  the Sleeper in the Pyramid. David’s a medium 
  now, tuned into the howling nightmare song 
  of the cosmos. He managed to pick up on stray 
  psychic signals and followed them back to 
  the Laundry. This attack is a cry for help. 
  Playing David
  There’s too much in your head. Religious 
  instruction, 
  a 
  childhood 
  of 
  rage 
  and 
  confusion, your own guilt and doubt, fear of 
  the outside world and fear of your captors, 
  and most of all the ceaseless, maddening 
  dreams of the Sleeper. It’s all too much, 
  and your head is cracking open.
  The Academy taught you to see everything 
  through a twisted version of Christianity. 
  In this religion, the Sleeper is Christ, and 
  the Laundry is part of the army of Satan. 
  However, you can’t take any more of Christ’s 
  love, so you are desperately reaching out to 
  Satan’s little minions for help.
  At the school, you fell in love with another 
  student named Zoë Waters, but you were both 
  placed in the gifted program, where carnal 
  lusts are forbidden. Worse, you read the 
  mind of one of your teachers, and you know 
  what they intend to do to her. You should be 
  overjoyed that she has such a great and holy 
  destiny, but instead it sickened you. You 
  have to save her. 
  Between the Academy’s instruction and the 
  dreams of the Sleeper, you’ve got a wealth 
  of occult lore churning around your brain. 
  You don’t know what you’re doing, but you 
  can instinctively cast several spells like 
  the warding you put around the house to keep 
  people out. 
  You want the dreams to stop, but you don’t 
  have the courage to kill yourself. Suicide 
  is a sin. Maybe the armies of Satan can 
  murder you, and that can be the loophole 
  that gets you past the Angel with a fiery 
  sword that sits in your mind and forces you 
  to be good. 
  David Philpott, Troubled Teen 
  STR 12 CON 15 SIZ 15 INT 11 POW 17
  DEX 13 CHA 8 
  EDU 13 SAN 30 HP 15
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Knife 50%, damage 1d4+db
  Skills: Dodge 30%, Knowledge (Religion) 50%, 
  Knowledge (Occult) 20%, Rant Crazily 70%, 
  Spot 40%, Telepathy 60%.
  
  89
  Talking to David
  David recognises the player character. “I dreamed about you. 
  You’re one of  the unbelievers, the servants of  the Antichrist. Show 
  me your warrant card, slave of  the beast! Show me!”
  If shown a warrant card or other proof that the character 
  is really in the Laundry, then David reveals what he wants 
  in his own unique idiom. “The Lord is coming, and he fills my 
  head with visions of  his holy temple. You are like the impaled men 
  who guard the gates, the Russians with the cold eyes who ate my 
  father, hollow be thy name. Please, let the cup pass from Zoë’s lips! 
  Keep Him away from her!” He then tries to stab the family 
  member through the cushions.
  If the characters don’t comply, he gets straight to the 
  stabbing.
  David’s got a DEX of 13, and needs only one successful 
  knife attack to kill the already-wounded victim. Whatever 
  the players do, it has to be fast enough to bring David down 
  quickly. A warrant card won’t work on him – he’s magically 
  protected against low-level geases like that. 
   
  Aftermath
  Once David’s restrained or dead, the characters can deal 
  with the aftermath of the scene. If the family member 
  is still alive, they need comforting – and answers! Do the 
  characters just try erasing memories, or come clean about 
  the Laundry? If the family member dies, then that’s a hit of 
  1/1d6 SAN. 
  If the characters delve into David’s background, see 
  Background Reading.
  2.	Mission	Briefing
  As soon as possible, the characters get called into the 
  Laundry for a debriefing. The incident is coded HERALD 
  GAMBIT. The briefing officer – a brusque, but still-human 
  woman from Monitoring named Karen Wills – explains 
  that Predictive Branch picked up several suspicious psychic 
  signals in the hours before David’s attack. Images of pain 
  and terror, emotional flashes mostly, but they were unable 
  to pin it down until David crystallised it for them. Weather 
  Service thinks that maybe – they can’t be sure, but it’s 
  possible – that there may have possibly been perhaps more 
  than one (or one, but not less than one) sources of this 
  psychic distress, and maybe possibly someone should take a 
  look. Maybe. For Predictive Branch, that counts as an iron-
  clad act of steely determination.
  Wills is more worried about how this David knew about 
  the Laundry and was able to identify a civilian connected to 
  a Laundry officer. Ever since the BLOODY BARON leak, 
  Counter-Espionage’s mole hunting has reached new heights 
  of paranoia and bloodletting. If David’s source is inside the 
  Laundry, it must be identified.
  As the player characters are already involved, they’re to 
  investigate. Wills tells the characters that she expects them 
  to be discrete – if they’re too loud, then the enemy – 
  whoever they are – may vanish. The Mission Budget is 25.
  You’re Off The Case
  As an optional twist, the character related 
  to the family member could be told not to 
  get involved in this investigation. They’re 
  already personally compromised. Obviously, 
  any headstrong player character will ignore 
  this command and keep investigating anyway. 
  Use this twist if your players are the sort to 
  defy orders and spark conflict with the Laundry.
  Background Reading
  Anyone with Research can easily dig up the following with 
  a few hours’ work:
  • 
  The assailant was David Philpott. 17 years old, with a 
  string of ASBOs and cautions for assault, breaking and 
  entering, drug possession and other charges. The most 
  recent incident was nearly two years ago.
  • 
  His address is on file; the characters can go interview 
  his mother if they wish. His mother Amy is full of 
  praise for the Washlamb Academy; she’s not a religious 
  person herself, but they’re so good there. 
   ◦
  A Spot test notices a Golden Promise Ministry 
  flyer on the table; Amy says that David’s school 
  sent it to her, and she’s thinking of going. 
  • 
  David’s parents are separated, and he has no official 
  contact with his father, Timothy Philpott.  
   ◦
  In fact, David met with his father just before the 
  incident. The characters may encounter Timothy 
  Philpott if they maintain surveillance on the 
  school. See Timothy Philpott, page 98 for details. 
  • 
  Two years ago, David transferred from a comprehensive 
  school in east London to the Washlamb Academy. 
  Checking with his old school shows that he was on the 
  verge of getting expelled; he was extremely disruptive 
  and violent.
   ◦
  A successful Insight roll notices that the teacher is 
  holding something back. If pressed, she admits that 
  David was a disturbing pupil. Sometimes, it seemed 
  like he could read minds. Nothing overt, but 
  there was always something very eerie about him. 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  90
  Examining David
  Even if David survived the events of last night, he’s gone 
  catatonic. An examination with Medicine (Forensics) 
  reveals the following:
  • 
  He’s been castrated. It was done several months ago 
  by a skilled surgeon. The testicles were removed and 
  replaced by plastic balls, and blood vessels in the 
  penis were cauterized to prevent him ever having an 
  erection. None of this surgery is visible without close 
  examination.
  • 
  Multiple bruises, scars and broken bones imply 
  violence and/or abuse. The more recent injuries are 
  all consistent with physical torment and restraint, but 
  there’s no sign of sexual abuse.
  • 
  There are track marks in his arms, suggesting 
  intravenous drug use. A toxicology screen shows traces 
  of powerful hallucinogenic substances, including 
  variations on MDMA (ecstasy), LSD and something 
  that it takes the Laundry’s lab boys several hours to 
  identify before coming back with a tentative diagnosis 
  that it’s some form of the fabled Liao drug that’s 
  supposed to send the user’s mind off voyaging through 
  time and space.
  Other notable clues:
  • 
  He’s got a crucifix around his neck, inscribed with 
  the Rune of Al-Sabbah. That’s a great way to guard 
  yourself against possession, in the same way walking 
  around with a handgun carved from a block of uranium 
  guards you against petty theft. Not so much overkill as 
  a suicide pact.
  • 
  In his wallet, there’s a cheap silver-plated ring engraved 
  with the letters ZW. (It’s a promise ring from Zoë 
  Waters.) There’s a lot of emotional energy bound up in 
  that ring, if the characters want to try scrying or using 
  sympathetic magic to find her. (See Zoë, page 97).
  • 
  He’s geased – any attempt to compel him to talk will 
  trigger a self-destruct routine in his brain. The Laundry 
  can unpick this spell, but it’ll take months before he’s 
  safe.
  The Washlamb Academy
  Research or a suitable Knowledge (like Politics or 
  Accounting) digs up the following clues:
  • 
  The Washlamb Trust is a private trust that operates three 
  second-level schools in England. The first school opened 
  in 2000, the second in 2004, and the third in 2008. 
  • 
  All three schools are academies, which means that 
  they’re government-funded, but are outside the direct 
  control of the Local Education Authority and are 
  partially sponsored by a private group – in this case, 
  the Washlamb Trust.
  • 
  The Washlamb Trust has a ‘strongly Christian ethos.’ 
  Digging into its background shows ties to various 
  fundamentalist Christian groups operating in the 
  United States, including the Golden Promise Ministry.
   ◦
  If this operation takes place after the events 
  of The Apocalypse Codex, then characters with 
  clearance for GOD GAME RAINBOW (or at 
  least SACRED BRUNCH, Hazard’s report on 
  the GPM’s contact with Downing Street) can 
  check the Stacks and learn about Golden Promise 
  Ministry’s occult ties. Otherwise, they’re going in 
  dark.
  • 
  The first two Washlamb Academies were established 
  in middle-to-upper-class districts, and most of the 
  students come from families who would traditionally 
  have gone to a public school. They’ve got excellent 
  academic records and have the money to attract some 
  of the best teachers.
  • 
  The Third Washlamb Academy is a boarding school, 
  unlike the other two. It takes ‘troubled teens’ and 
  ‘invests time, money, hope and charity’ in them. It too 
  has excellent results, turning low-achieving kids with 
  terrible records into model students in a matter of 
  weeks. 
  • 
  Six months ago, a bus carrying a dozen students back 
  from a field trip to Scotland crashed into a petrol 
  tanker, leaving no survivors. An inquiry found that the 
  fault was entirely with the driver of the tanker. If the 
  characters dig into the bus crash, give them Handout #1
   ◦
  Following up on Zoë may bring them to Handout 
  #2 – see Zoë, page 97.
  The Bus Crash
  Everyone who was on that bus had been dead 
  for weeks before the bus hit the petrol 
  tanker. The school faked the crash to 
  explain the deaths of students and staff 
  who it had previously killed in ritual 
  sacrifices or to prevent them from talking. 
  Robert Vake forced the tanker driver to 
  crash into the bus.
  
  91
  3.	Jesus	was	in	Griffindor
  There’s a particular sort of light that only appears in stock 
  photographs on the covers of prospectuses and glossy 
  corporate reports. You know it – pictures of four ethnically 
  diverse pretty young people laughing on the grass in front 
  of a striking, high-tech building, all suffused by a bright 
  glow. It’s like a transmission from another universe where 
  things are just better – more fun, more educational, more 
  successful. Fragments of a better life, caught and pinned in 
  photographs like images from a wonderful dream. 
  From a distance, the Washlamb Academy looks like that. It’s 
  a shining temple to education surrounded by leafy trees and 
  green playing fields… and high walls with security fences 
  and CCTV cameras. Security here is unobtrusive, but very, 
  very tight. The campus consists of four dormitories, a main 
  assembly hall and church, a science block and a humanities 
  block, and an administration building and cafeteria. The 
  current student population is 507, but the campus can 
  house up to 1,200 students.
  There’s a definite Stepford vibe to the whole place. 
  Dormitories: The four dormitories (girls and boys, over 
  and under fifteen) are all very well equipped. Students share 
  a room with another classmate, but all the rooms have 
  private bathrooms, computers and internet connections – 
  the works. There’s a shop, a laundrette, a sandwich place 
  and a recreation room on the ground floor of the dormitory 
  complex. Each student has a swipe card to open the front 
  door and the door to their room. 
  Assembly Hall: A large auditorium, big enough to hold all 
  of the students and staff. It’s used as a sports hall or event 
  centre (or ritual summoning space, after school hours).
  Church: An impressive building, all 
  brushed concrete and glass. The huge 
  double doors are oddly out of place 
  in such a modern building – they were 
  salvaged from an older church, and the 
  eerie bas-relief carvings go unmentioned 
  by most visitors. The large altar is a scale 
  model of the Sleeper’s tomb within the 
  Pyramid atop the Plateau. 
  Science Block: Classrooms, laboratories, 
  lecture theatres. Nothing out of the 
  ordinary, with the exception of the nurse’s 
  station. While you might expect to find 
  hallucinogenic drugs in a school, they’re 
  normally sold by creepy drug dealers 
  lurking in the bushes, not stocked in the 
  medicine cabinet. 
  Humanities Block: As above, but observant characters 
  might spot some rather unusual books on the library 
  shelves. There are small meditation and counselling rooms 
  for one-on-one tuition and prayer on every floor of this 
  building, used for teaching the gifted students.
  Cafeteria: Jamie Oliver would be proud. Then he’d be 
  sacrificed to their dread god. 
  Administration Building: The heart of the school, the 
  admin building has the staff room, records office, reception 
  and offices for the key staff members. There’s also a security 
  room where Vake or his lieutenants monitor the security 
  cameras.
  Security Systems
  A tall wall topped with a concealed sensor surrounds the 
  whole compound; any pressure on the sensor triggers an 
  alarm. All gates and other approaches to the compound are 
  watched by security cameras. Inside, all the buildings have 
  keycard locks, and there are yet more security cameras and 
  motion-sensitive floodlights attached to the exteriors. One 
  of Vake’s guards is on duty at all times; if the alarm is raised, 
  then more guards show up within ten minutes. The guards 
  carry illegal handguns, but will only fire if they believe the 
  school is in danger or if the characters stumble across the 
  Black Pit.
  In addition, Malcolm Beal cast three protective spells on the 
  school. The first is a simple aversion ward – anyone who 
  gets too close to the Black Pit experiences an intense feeling 
  of embarrassment and awkwardness, a blast of I shouldn’t be 
  here that drives away most intruders. Any warded character 
  can ignore this – it’s only a Level One warding. Pushing 
  through it without a ward costs 1d4 SAN.
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  92
  The second is a protective anti-scrying spell. Any attempts 
  to use scrying, remote viewing or any other forms of occult 
  information-gathering trip this spell. Beal doesn’t know 
  who’s trying to spy on the school, but it warns him that 
  someone’s snooping around. This spell centres on the Black 
  Pit, and provides a small amount of occult occlusion that 
  prevents the Pit from being seen directly.
  The third is a nasty beast, a really big hellhound. This 
  monster lives in the woods above the Black Pit, but can 
  be called by Beal or Gantz to help defend the school. The 
  creature has a Defensive Binding spell protecting it, which 
  absorbs the first 15 points of damage from bullets (and also 
  blocks banishment rounds). Students who misbehave are 
  sometimes sent for a walk in the woods…
  The Hellhound
  STR 18  CON 18  SIZ 13  INT 7  POW 13
  DEX 15  HP 16
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Bite 40%, damage 1d8
  Balefire Breath 30%, damage 1d6
  Armour: 1-point fur, 15 points of ablative 
  Defensive Binding
  Skills: Hide 60%, Spot Hidden 80%, Track 40%
  Sanity Loss: 0/1d3
  Teaching Methods
  The Washlamb Academy demands discipline. In addition 
  to academic lessons, students are expected to pray, attend 
  religious services and study the Bible and related teachings 
  daily, as well as exercise and work in the grounds. Most 
  students also attend regular counselling sessions or one-to-
  one lessons “to get them up to speed.” 
  Contact between parents and children is kept to a minimum, 
  unless the parents are part of the Golden Promise Ministry 
  church or a related group. Given the background of many 
  of the children, a sizeable number of the students are 
  orphaned, were neglected by their parents, or were placed in 
  care and have no contact with their parents anyway.
  The school places most of its emphasis on history, 
  languages, religious instruction and business studies. Most 
  of the sciences are neglected (it’s not so much “we do 
  not teach the controversy” as “you won’t need science 
  when Magic Jesus comes back”), although the school 
  has a surprisingly excellent syllabus in mathematics and 
  computer studies.
  Not listed on the official curriculum are several activities, 
  including:
  • 
  Classes in Enochian, angel summoning, and other ritual 
  devotions.
  
  93
  • 
  Testing for divine gifts. These start with basic psychic 
  tests; students who demonstrate actual abilities are 
  moved to the ‘gifted’ program.
  • 
  Meditation and religious instruction: Students are 
  encouraged (with the aid of chemical enhancements 
  and ritual magic) to meditate on images of His glorious 
  Pyramid, the face of God, and the End Times.  
  • 
  Fruitfulness: God commanded that humanity be 
  fruitful and multiply, and the school helps with that. 
  Not only does it take in pregnant teenagers, it also 
  encourages relationships between ‘approved’ students. 
  If the students are old enough, the school arranges 
  for them to be married; if that is not possible, then 
  the child is taken by the Golden Promise Ministry for 
  use elsewhere. Female students are also subjected to 
  involuntary egg harvesting. 
  • 
  Military training: All male students are taught to defend 
  the church against unbelievers. The school doesn’t have 
  any legal firearms, so the students train with replica 
  weapons. 
  • 
  Mortification of the Flesh: In general, being a 
  Quiverfull ministry, the Golden Promise Ministry 
  is strongly pro-life. Still, some are chosen by God to 
  make special sacrifices so their divine gifts are focused 
  and enhanced, and they are not distracted by the needs 
  of the flesh.
  • 
  Disciplinary methods for students who do not accept 
  the school’s rules and regulations. The school uses 
  physical and mental coercion and geas spells to keep 
  troublesome students in check.
  The Students
  507 students, ranging in age from 11 to 18. Most are perfectly 
  ordinary, for values of ordinary that encompass “moderate 
  to severe psychological issues/terrible behaviour records/
  violent impulses” with “brainwashed by a fundamentalist 
  cult” on top. Take the most thuggish teenage scumbag you 
  can imagine, put him through a Come-to-Jesus makeover 
  and stuff him full of ADHD drugs and love bombing, and 
  you’ve got the average student at Washlamb.
  Currently fifty-four students are part of the “gifted” 
  program. These are students who’ve passed the second-
  level screening progress for potential psychic ability. They 
  get extra religious education as described above. Not all of 
  the gifted-program students develop supernatural abilities; 
  those who fail to manifest gifts can still help as human 
  sacrifices, and are ritually sacrificed to fuel their more 
  fervent classmates.
  The Staff
  As academies are state funded, the characters can easily get 
  access to some staff records. In general, all the staff has 
  excellent qualifications. Roughly half are American, and 
  more than 75% are of a Christian denomination of one 
  flavour or another. Several have degrees in esoteric topics – 
  apparently the answer to the question “what do you do with a 
  joint degree in Mathematical Theory and Dzongha?” is “teach at 
  a creepy school.” 
  Notable members of staff include:
  •	
  Principal Nigel Cragge: English. Very English, 
  in fact – he’s employed as a figurehead, and is paid a 
  large amount of money to not do his job as principal. 
  He has no idea what’s going on in the school. He’s a 
  former civil servant in OFSTED,2 and he’s very adept 
  at bureaucratic stalling.
  •	
  Vice Principal Adam Gantz: See the sidebar.
  •	
  Pastor Malcolm Beal: The school’s spiritual guidance 
  counsellor. Big smile, great hair, the sort of preacher 
  you’d expect to see at a megachurch instead of at a 
  small school. He’s also trained in ritual magic, and 
  works with Vake to provide occult countermeasures 
  like geases and wards.
  •	
  Legal Counsel Henrietta Cable: Why, you might 
  ask, does a small school keep a high-priced City lawyer 
  from Barretts & Grey on retainer? Cable’s a shark 
  who specialized in knotty patent disputes before she 
  crashed her car and found Jesus in a concrete barrier 
  on the M25. As soon as there’s a hint of trouble, the 
  school deploys her. 
  •	
  Chemistry Teacher Jill Marsham: One of the newer 
  members of staff. She’s a committed Christian, but 
  she’s not part of the Golden Promise. She was drawn 
  to the school because of its Christian ethos, though she 
  now suspects that something strange is going on. Vake 
  has his eye on her; if she gets too close to the Black Pit 
  or the school’s religious education program, she’ll get a 
  bus trip to Scotland.
  •	
  Truancy	Officer	Robert	Vake: See the sidebar.
  2. Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  94
  Adam Gantz
  The power behind the principal’s office. 
  Gantz is a descendant of the founder of the 
  Golden Promise Ministry. He grew up in the 
  cult, and is consumed by its holy purpose. 
  He believes that he will find a prophet of 
  the elect among the children of England, 
  and is utterly obsessed with this cause. He 
  loathes disobedient children; disobedience 
  is a sign of faithlessness. Honour thy father 
  and mother, says the Lord. In this place he 
  is their father, and he that spares his rod 
  hates his son. He runs the Black Pit (see 
  page 97), together with Malcolm Beal.
  More importantly, Gantz is a ritual sorcerer 
  of no small power, and he’s been briefed 
  on UK-based OCCINTEL operations.3 See Cult 
  Responses, page 100.
  Playing Gantz:
  • 
  You’re not only a crazy cultist who worships 
  a distinctly squamous Jesus, you’re an 
  entitled crazy cultist. Your great-great-
  grandfather founded the Golden Promise, 
  and you’re convinced that you’re destined 
  for greatness. The Washlamb Academy is 
  your ticket to fulfilling that destiny. 
  Like Enoch, you walk with God.
  • 
  You’re very, very, very tightly-wound. 
  The students see you as a terrifyingly 
  harsh martinet; the staff sees you as 
  either a stern father or a borderline 
  psychopath. The pressure is getting to 
  you, and you’re almost ready to burst.
  • 
  Speak in clipped, harsh tones. Use a 
  stapler or some other piece of office 
  stationery as a focus for your sublimated 
  aggression. 
  Adam Gantz
  STR 10 CON 13 SIZ 12 INT 16 POW 16
  DEX 12 CHA 15 EDU 18 SAN 0 
  HP 13
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Weapons: Glock 17 Handgun 60%, damage 1d10
  Spells: Given time to prepare, Gantz readies 
  a Defensive Ward (Level 3), an invisibility 
  Entropic Manipulation (also Level 3) and a 
  lethal Offensive Ward (Level 3; 2d6 damage).
  Skills: Bureaucracy 60%, Command 65%, Cthulhu 
  Mythos 30%, Drive 50%, Fast Talk 55%, Insight 
  50%, 
  Knowledge 
  (Religion) 
  80%, 
  Knowledge 
  (Occult) 40%, Sorcery 55%, Spot 60%, Teach 65%.
  Robert Vake
  His official title is ‘truancy officer,’ which 
  is absurdly redundant at a boarding school. 
  Most truancy officers don’t command a small 
  unit of armed guards, either. Vake’s a scary 
  man. Ex-Army, the demeanour of a Gila Monster, 
  and the empathy of a stainless steel knife. 
  He believes that most of humanity consists of 
  irredeemably sinful beasts, and that he is a 
  righteous man who must sometimes cull them. 
  He’d be a serial killer if he wasn’t a cultist; 
  he found a genuine higher purpose, and is 
  utterly committed to freeing the Sleeper. 
  Gantz’s plan to find a psychic powerful enough 
  to call the Sleeper does not sit well with 
  Vake; it smacks of defying the prophet’s 
  instructions in the Book of Enoch. Still, the 
  church sent him here, and he’ll do his duty.
  Playing Vake:
  • 
  Talk as little as possible. Use silence 
  as a weapon.
  • 
  Fear is good. People should be afraid of 
  God… and His servants.
  • 
  Stare right at the player characters.
  Robert Vake
  STR 17 CON 15 SIZ 16 INT 10 POW 8
  DEX 15 CHA 10 EDU 16 SAN 0 
  HP 16
  Damage Bonus: +1d6
  Weapons: Glock 17 handgun 80%, damage 1d10
  Heckler & Koch MP5 Submachine Gun 75%, damage 
  1d10 (burst fire possible)
  Armour: Ballistic vest (8 points against 
  firearms).
  Artefacts: Charm of Unlocking – allows him to 
  open any mechanical locks.
  Skills: Brawl 70%, Climb 60%, Command 50%, 
  Demolition 70%, Dodge 65%, Drive 65%, Grapple 
  65%, Hide 80%, Melee Weapon 70%, Spot 55%, 
  Sorcery 25%, Spot 65%, Stealth 70%, Track 60%.
  3. He doesn’t know about the Laundry by name, but he knows the forces of darkness are legion and have their claws in the British government. 
  
  95
  Vake’s Men
  A sordid assortment of true believers and 
  hired thugs. Not especially competent, but 
  reliable muscle.
  STR 14   CON 13   SIZ 12   INT 10   POW 8
  DEX 11   CHA 10   EDU 16   SAN 0    HP 13
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Glock 17 Handgun 40%, damage 1d10
  Heckler & Koch MP5 Submachine Gun 35%, 
  damage 1d10 (burst fire possible)
  Armour: Ballistic vest (8 points against 
  firearms)
  Skills: Brawl 50%, Dodge 55%, Drive 50%, 
  Grapple 60%, Spot 50%.
  Contacting the School
  If the characters contact the school openly, they will be 
  stonewalled. Principal Cragge (with lawyer in tow) meets 
  any characters posing as Ministry of Education inspectors/
  journalists/police/concerned citizens, and expresses his 
  sorrow and regret that David Philpott was involved in 
  such a bizarre incident. He produces paperwork showing 
  that David was responding to therapy and counselling, 
  and that he had no history of violent behaviour while at 
  Washlamb. Cragge’s at a genuine loss to explain it; if the 
  player characters press him, then Henrietta Cable steps in to 
  protect the school. The young man showed no signs that he 
  was about to do anything dangerous, and he was off school 
  property at the time of the incident. 
  The school denies all knowledge of any injuries or surgical 
  modifications to David Philpott.
  Official	Channels
  Trying to inspect the school through any sort of official 
  channels (police investigation, school safety inspection, etc.) 
  is equally ineffective. Cable hovers over the characters like 
  a litigious vulture, and throws red tape at them if they get 
  close to anything. Trying to force this issue will impact badly 
  on the characters, costing them Status. Cragge has various 
  officials in the Ministry of Education and Downing 
  Street on speed-dial, so characters who use the brute-
  force approach quickly find themselves talking to their 
  line manager who just got an earful from the Minister of 
  Education who just got an earful from some advisor. The 
  characters need to clearly tie the school to occult activity 
  before they can deploy the machinery of the state. 
  4. Covert Ops
  Subtlety and player characters don’t often mix, but here 
  are some ways to investigate the school without flashing a 
  warrant card.
  Surveillance
  A bit of old-fashioned tradecraft pays dividends. 
  Trailing Teachers: Following teachers (with a successful 
  Stealth test) lets the characters identify Jill Marsham as a 
  potential recruit. She’s clearly troubled by the incident with 
  David Philpott (he’s in her chemistry class), and meets 
  Timothy Philpott in a pub near the school, where they 
  discuss David. (See the sidebar for more on David’s father 
  on page 98).
  Intercepting Communications: The school’s phone and 
  computer networks are surprisingly secure. A Difficulty 
  Computer (Hacking) roll or some covert bugging gets the 
  characters in. At a suitable juncture, give them Handout #3. 
  Satellite Imagery: Examining a satellite photo of the 
  school shows that there are several buildings on the grounds 
  that don’t show up in the official plans. These buildings are 
  weapons bunkers, guard posts, and the Black Pit (see page 
  97).
  Recruiting an Agent
  The best way into the school is to turn either a student or 
  a teacher into a spy. While gifted students are geased to 
  keep silent, the rest are free of magical compulsion (but 
  see Sanitise, page 101). Similarly, while most of the teaching 
  staff are initiates of the Golden Promise or bound by 
  magic, some of the new recruits (like Jill Marsham) are 
  potential recruits. Jill, for example, might work with the 
  Laundry if the characters convince her that more students 
  like David are in danger. Other agents could be recruited 
  through blackmail, 
  Alternatively, the characters can provide a suitable agent and 
  wait for the Washlamb Academy to take the bait. (“Look, 
  we’ve got this poor seventh son of  a seventh son who was born 
  on a moonless night and who can talk to cats – wherever will he 
  get a first-class education?”) Using juveniles in an intelligence 
  operation is dangerous; if the mission fails, then the 
  characters can expect Operational Oversight to come down 
  hard on them for endangering a child.
  Recruiting an agent comes in five phases:4
  4. The Agent’s Handbook has a lot more detail on handling agents and other elements of tradecraft in the Laundry. 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  96
  Background Check: Is this agent suitable? Does he 
  have the nerve to carry out the mission? Is he already 
  compromised by the enemy? What’s the best recruitment 
  pitch? Does the Laundry need leverage over the agent, or 
  will he do his duty for Queen and Country? Likely skill tests 
  at this stage include Insight, Research, Technology Use 
  (Surveillance Equipment) and Research.
  Approach: The Laundry officer approaches the agent and 
  tries to recruit him. Actually “tries” is the wrong word – 
  no competent handler will make an approach without 
  being virtually certain that the agent will agree. Obviously, 
  the approach and any other meetings between agent and 
  handler have to be carried out in secret, as the prospective 
  agent may be under observation by enemy forces. Likely 
  skill tests here are Persuade or Fast Talk.  
  Handling: The characters need to prepare the agent 
  for the mission. They need to work out what the agent 
  already knows, what he can find out without risk, and 
  where he needs to go to find out what’s really going on. 
  The agent also needs to be trained to use whatever tools 
  he’ll need. How are the characters going to communicate 
  with their agent? A wire is simple, but might be detected. 
  How about a scrying spell? Or some form of  Destiny 
  Entanglement?
  Operation: Finally, it’s the spy’s version of the big date. The 
  agent gets sent into the heart of darkness to recover the 
  data – in this case, information on the Black Pit and proof 
  that the school is operating an occult program. The agent 
  needs to get in and get out without arousing suspicion. 
  Debriefing: The handler collects the information off the 
  agent, and may arrange for the agent to disappear or provide 
  protection against retaliation by the enemy.
  Undercover	Officer
  The characters could also try sending one or more player 
  characters in undercover. They could apply for a job in 
  the school (“Oh, did your entire Mathematics department get 
  food poisoning on the same day? It just so happens that we’ve 
  got six highly qualified replacement teachers looking for work.”), 
  or steal the identity of an existing staff member using a 
  combination of conventional disguise and glamour spells 
  (remembering, of course, to use Destiny Entanglement 
  or some other method of identity-theft to get past the 
  school’s wards). Mr. Gantz interviews all potential new 
  teachers personally to make sure they’re a good fit for the 
  school.
  Black Bag Job
  Finally, there’s always the good-old option of sneaking into 
  the school at night. The grounds are not a safe place to walk 
  after dark – see Security Systems on page 91.
  Accounts & Rumours
  Once the characters gain access to the students and staff, 
  they can pick up all sorts of interesting rumours.
  • 
  David Philpott met with his father several times 
  recently, in breach of a restraining order. If anyone 
  finds out about that, his father will be in big trouble.
  • 
  A big black dog lives in the woods at the back of the 
  school. It’s dangerous to go there at night.
  • 
  The gifted kids are weird, and aren’t allowed to talk 
  about their special classes.
  Running an Agent Scene
  If the players go for the agent plan, then there are several ways to play the scene:
  Offscreen action: Once prepped, the agent goes into the school. Make a secret roll against the 
  most appropriate skills of the player characters, reflecting how well they prepared the agent. 
  For example, if the plan is for Jill Marsham to sneak into Mr. Gantz’s office and stick a virus-
  laden USB stick into his computer, then secretly make Stealth and Computer Use rolls using the 
  player characters’ skills. If successful, then the agent completes the mission. If a roll fails, 
  then the agent was captured, or spotted, or maybe even turned.
  Bird on a Wire: If the characters fit their agent with a wire or other communications method, 
  then they can run the agent as a sort of time-shared player character. Those not giving orders 
  to the agent can still help out (providing distractions, advising on technical problems, hacking 
  into the school computers to open doors).
  Player Character agent: For added drama, let one of the players play the agent as a temporary 
  player character. Remember that civilians don’t have the heightened Madness Threshold of Laundry 
  officers, so they’re more likely to go nuts if they run into something ghastly.
  
  97
  • 
  One of the gifted, a girl called Jemima, got really sick 
  when she started on the program. She started throwing 
  up, and talking in tongues, and some people swear 
  that her eyes started glowing. She left school for a few 
  weeks, and came back just in time to go on that bus trip 
  to Scotland.
  • 
  Vice-principal Gantz mentioned a trip to America to 
  visit the Golden Promise Ministry. He’ll take a few 
  students with him.
  • 
  One of the kids smuggled in a box of condoms and 
  started selling them. Vake tracked him down and 
  punished him for defying the Lord’s commandments.
  • 
  Vice-principal Gantz really runs the school.
  • 
  Zoë Waters? She’s one of the gifted kids. She’s sick, so 
  they’ve sent her home for a few weeks.
  The Black Pit
  The Black Pit is the dirty little secret at the heart of the 
  school. It’s located in a small wooded area at the back of 
  the school grounds, on the far side of the football pitches. 
  The Pit was originally a disused air raid shelter; now, it’s the 
  cult’s secret temple.
  Finding the Black Pit is not easy. It’s carefully hidden (a 
  Difficult Spot or Navigate check to find it when searching 
  the woods) and heavily guarded. In addition to the 
  Hellhound on the threshold, the heavy steel door leading 
  into the Pit is secured with an electronic lock and a rune 
  of warding (Level 3, 2d6 damage and sounds the alarm). 
  A steep steel staircase winds down into the darkness. The 
  atmosphere inside the Pit is dank and cold.
  At the bottom of the pit, the characters find:
  •	
  The Armoury: The school is prepared for a siege. 
  They’ve 
  got 
  automatic 
  weapons, 
  ammunition, 
  explosives, medical supplies, dried food and bottled 
  water to last a long time. There’s also electronics 
  components and occult paraphernalia aplenty – 
  nothing cutting-edge, but enough to suggest that 
  someone knows their way around a summoning grid.
  •	
  The Surgery: A small, but well-equipped surgery. 
  Here is where Beal ‘augments’ some of the gifted, and 
  delivers children.
  •	
  The Nursery: The school’s attitude towards 
  procreation (be fruitful or it goes on your permanent 
  record) means that at any time, several of the female 
  students are pregnant. Their children are delivered 
  here, in secret, and then smuggled to Golden Promise-
  run care facilities. The nursery is staffed by a terrified 
  woman named Murana; she’s an illegal immigrant 
  from the Sudan, who’s ended up imprisoned in an 
  underground nursery taking care of a never-ending 
  stream of newborns. 
  •	
  The Chamber of  the Sleeper: This large room is 
  decorated according to the formulas described in the 
  Testament of  Enoch, so it’s a scale model of the temple 
  atop the pyramid. In the middle of the temple, where 
  the sleeper’s coffin should be, is a floatation tank wired 
  up to a live summoning grid and a laptop running a 
  Destiny Entanglement spell. Zoë Waters is trapped in 
  the floatation tank, as the grid pumps the dreams of 
  the Sleeper through her fragile mind.
  5. Zoë
  There are Listeners, out there in the stranger realms of 
  existence, timeless beings bound by laws laid down by long-
  dead races. They wait for commands from our universe, for 
  vibrating curves arcing through the mathematical plane that 
  is the only common ground between here and there. Most 
  of these terrible Listeners are quiescent, dormant, waiting 
  for the conjunction to arrive.
  Others stir in their sleep. These ones are not content to wait; 
  instead, they reach forth their tendrils of influence, probing 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  98
  Timothy Philpott
  Tim Philpott is not the sort of man one would 
  expect to find at the heart of an occult 
  conspiracy. He’s an unemployed alcoholic and 
  a terrible father, although to his credit he 
  tried to change all three of those traits. He 
  failed with two of them, as he usually does 
  – he can’t hold down a job and he crashed out 
  of rehab – but he has finally taken on some 
  responsibility for his son. Back when he was 
  married to Amy Philpott, Tim blamed most of 
  their marital strife on his ‘fuckhead weird 
  son’ David. Now, he recognizes that he was 
  partially to blame, and wants to make amends.
  He had no idea how to go about contacting 
  David, but then he met a journalist named Mary 
  Keller. She told him that David was now in 
  a special school, the Washlamb Academy, but 
  Mary had doubts about the school’s methods. 
  Timothy’s fervently anti-religious, and was 
  furious that Amy had handed his son over to an 
  ultra-Christian school. 
  Now, Timothy is ‘Mary’s’ unwitting agent. 
  Through one of the teachers (Jill Marsham), 
  he made contact with his son David. He met 
  with David half-a-dozen times, questioning 
  him about the school while trying to rebuild 
  a relationship with the troubled boy. 
  Finding Timothy: The characters can run across 
  Timothy in several ways:
  • 
  Digging into David Philpott’s background.
  • 
  Via Jill Marsham, either by questioning or 
  following her.
  • 
  If they watch the school, they may also 
  spot Timothy Philpott doing the same 
  thing.
  Questioning Timothy: Timothy has no idea 
  about his son’s bizarre ritual attack; as far 
  as Timothy knows, David is still somewhere 
  behind the high walls of the Washlamb Academy. 
  Revealing that David is dead or in custody 
  causes Timothy to break down in confusion 
  and anger. In this vulnerable state, he’s 
  vulnerable to questioning:
  • 
  He can identify Jill Marsham as his contact 
  inside the school.
  • 
  He’s met with David several times in the 
  last few months, trying to rebuild his 
  relationship with the boy, and shake some 
  of that religious nonsense out of his 
  head. 
  • 
  He knows about Robert Vake; that bastard 
  threatened him when he found Timothy 
  snooping around outside the school walls.
  • 
  If pressed, he admits that a journalist, 
  Mary Keller, told him where his son was 
  and encouraged him to investigate the 
  school.
  • 
  Keller 
  also 
  told 
  him 
  about 
  another 
  student at the school, Zoë Waters; David 
  befriended her.
  Playing Timothy:
  • 
  You’re not that bright, and are completely 
  unequipped to deal with your present 
  situation. Get pointlessly aggressive 
  whenever you run into a problem.
  • 
  All you wanted was a normal son – not 
  the unstable, violent, strange boy you 
  once knew, or the religious freak they’re 
  trying to turn him into at that damned 
  school.
  • 
  Your hands shake all the time, and you 
  sometimes stammer. If anyone acknowledges 
  this weakness, get angry at them.
  the weak places in the fabric of reality. Some of these touch 
  the brains of humans, cracking them open and letting the 
  outside rush in. Call these unfortunates the touched, call 
  them prophets or psychics or gifted. Psychics are those who 
  were blindly groped by an alien god.
  There are other ways to open the third eye. Rituals and 
  spells and blasphemous ceremonies that rip the protective 
  caul from the human soul, and turn you into an open 
  door for horrors to stroll through. The girl now called 
  Zoë Waters was born in Tajikistan sixteen years ago. Her 
  parents were members of  a cult that worshipped the 
  Sleeper; Zoë was conceived on the slopes of  the Plateau 
  of  Leng under alien stars. A Thirteenth Directorate 
  black operation destroyed the cult before the cult could 
  use Zoë to contact the Sleeper. Four years ago, the 
  Directorate planted Zoë in London with a minder named 
  Karla Waters; a year later, this minder faked her own 
  death so that Zoë ended up in care. Then they waited for 
  someone to take the bait.
  
  99
  A medium like Zoë is an irresistible prize to any apocalyptic 
  cult trying to bring about the Apocalypse. Therefore, 
  the Directorate booby-trapped her by inscribing a very 
  subtle formula into her soul. If she’s a part of a large-
  scale summoning (Class Five), that spell triggers, altering 
  the summoning. Instead of calling its intended target, the 
  summoning gets redirected, conjuring up seething nuclear 
  chaos right on top of the ritual. She’s a poison pill for any 
  cult that tries to use her. 
  Zoë has no idea about any of this. She doesn’t remember 
  her birth parents, and they erased her memory of those 
  four years in a Thirteenth Directorate laboratory. She does 
  remember her ‘aunt’ Karla, who was ‘murdered’ when she 
  was twelve. 
  Considering Zoë’s tragic history, and the fact that she 
  dreams of the Plateau every night, she’s remarkably sane. 
  Zoë & The School
  Before this adventure begins, Vice-Principal Gantz 
  imprisoned Zoë in the Black Pit. She’s nearly ready to be 
  shown to the elders of the church, and he wants to isolate 
  her from any corruptive spiritual influences. 
  The Shutdown Code
  The Directorate implanted a post-hypnotic suggestion 
  in Zoë when they prepared her – if she hears the right 
  codeword, she’ll fall asleep instantly. The codeword is a 
  short phrase in Enochian; it translates to “Not dead, but 
  dreaming/not yet, but soon.”
  Any character with previous experience of Directorate 
  tactics, or who checks previous mission logs (with 
  Knowledge (Espionage) or Research) could find out 
  about the Directorate’s habit of planting back doors in their 
  agents’ souls. Alternatively, some elder spy like Angleton 
  could mention the probability that there’s a shutdown code 
  once the characters learn about Zoë’s true nature.
  Playing Zoë:
  Be as sympathetic and ordinary as possible. Some of this is 
  an act – you consciously try to be normal; normality is your 
  wall against the awful things in your head.
  You’re very good at pretending to believe pretty much 
  anything. Like a spy, you live your cover.
  Changes the subject whenever your family or your past 
  comes up in conversation.
  Sometimes, react to things that only you can see. 
  Zoë’s Watcher
  For the last four years, Nadja Mikhailov, aka Karla Waters, 
  has watched over Zoë. Karla’s a Thirteenth Directorate 
  agent; she spent a year posing as Zoë’s aunt to establish the 
  girl’s legend, then faked her own death in a way that was 
  certain to draw the attention of anyone watching for cult 
  activity.
  Since her ‘death,’ Karla’s continued to monitor her ‘niece’ 
  at a distance. She comes to London every few weeks to 
  check in on Zoë, using the cover identity of Mary Keller, 
  a photographer and freelance journalist. Karla remains 
  fond of Zoë, and regrets putting the young woman in 
  this position. Karla tries to soothe her conscience by 
  telling herself that Zoë is doomed either way – either 
  she dies unwittingly stopping a cult triggering CASE 
  NIGHTMARE GREEN prematurely, or she dies when 
  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN hits and something crawls 
  into her inviting soul. 
  When the Washlamb Academy took the bait and accepted 
  Zoë as a pupil, Karla made contact with Timothy Philpott, 
  David’s estranged father. She uses him as an unwitting agent 
  to watch both the school and Zoë. Again posing as Mary 
  Keller, she claimed to be a journalist working on an expose 
  about the school, and pointed at Zoë as an example of the 
  vulnerable teenagers being preyed upon by the Washlamb 
  Trust. 
  Activating Zoë: The Thirteenth Directorate believes 
  that the Golden Promise Ministry is a clear danger, and 
  wants Zoë moved into position to poison any attempted 
  summoning. As it is unlikely that the Golden Promise cult 
  will try anything on British soil, that means they need to 
  push the cult into moving Zoë to the United States and their 
  core temple in Colorado.
  Investigating Karla: The characters may make contact with 
  ‘Mary Keller’ via Timothy Philpott. If they try following 
  her, she goes into full-evasion mode (it’s a contest of her 
  Hide against the player’s Spot). She’ll use occult evasion 
  methods like Entropy Manipulation if she has to. 
  If the characters have the dossier on Zoë Waters 
  (handout #2), then a Difficult Disguise/Technical Use 
  (Photography) or Computer Use (Art) roll lets the 
  characters realize that ‘Mary Keller’ is also ‘Karla Waters.’
  Digging into Mary Keller’s history with a Difficult Research 
  roll turns up evidence to suggest that her job as a 
  photojournalist is a cover identity. The Keller identity seems 
  to have been used by at least three different people over the 
  last decade, and one of them is a suspected Russian spy. 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  100
  Karla’s staying at a small hotel near the school; searching her 
  room turns up flyers about the Golden Promise Ministry, a 
  copy of The Testament of  Enoch, and surveillance photos of 
  the school, including shots of Zoë Waters, David Philpott, 
  Adam Gantz and Robert Vake. If the characters haven’t 
  bugged the school, you can also stick in a copy of Handout 
  #3 here.
  Interrogating Karla: Karla sticks to her cover identity as 
  Mary Keller for as long as she can, or until it is no longer 
  useful. At that point, she will identify herself as a Thirteen 
  Directorate officer, and explain that she is in England to 
  oversee the conclusion of a long-running sting operation 
  aimed at the Golden Promise Ministry. She asks for the 
  Laundry’s assistance in ensuring that Zoë Waters is brought 
  to the United States by Gantz.
  If the characters make the connection between Karla and 
  Zoë Waters, then they can try to put her through a wringer 
  of guilt. How can she sacrifice her ‘niece’ like this? A 
  successful Insight roll can tell that Karla clearly still has 
  some emotional attachment to the girl. If the characters 
  do this, then the Directorate may step in to ensure the 
  operation goes ahead. 
  Karla knows Zoë’s shutdown code. 
  Playing Karla: 
  • 
  You’re a veteran undercover officer. Commit yourself to 
  whatever role you’re playing, whether it’s the crusading 
  journalist Mary Keller, the eccentric, but caring aunt 
  Karla, or the stalwart, cold-hearted Directorate agent 
  Nadja.
  • 
  You’re a qualified necromancer – use magic to gain 
  advantage where you can.
  • 
  Let your voice show a little genuine emotion when 
  talking about Zoë; all other feelings are feigned.
  STR 11   CON 14    SIZ 9      INT 16    POW 14
  DEX 13  CHA 10    EDU 17 SAN 40    HP 12
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Weapons: Browning Hi-Power Handgun 60%, damage 1d10
  Artefacts: Ward (Class 3), Rune of Destruction (1d10 
  damage, attack with the Sorcery skill).
  Skills: Athletics 50%, Brawl 60%, Computer Use (Magic) 
  40%, Cthulhu Mythos 20%, Dodge 50%, Disguise 70%, 
  Hide 50%, Knowledge (Espionage) 70%, Persuade 60%, 
  Sense 50%, Sorcery 45%, Spot 60%, Stealth 70%.
  A Word from the Directorate
  This 
  is 
  the 
  Thirteenth 
  Directorate’s 
  operation – the Laundry’s involved only to 
  put pressure on Gantz. The Directorate may 
  intercede to stop the characters interfering 
  with Karla Waters, or to warn them to back 
  off if the situation gets out of hand. They 
  may also step in to force Karla to carry out 
  her mission should the characters convince 
  her to listen to her conscience.
  The Directorate might go for:
  • 
  A little chat: Nikolai Panin invites 
  one of the characters for a pint, ala 
  The Fuller Memorandum. He hints darkly 
  about Zoë’s purpose, and suggests that 
  the characters help Karla complete her 
  mission. After all, it’s the best way 
  to get that unexploded nuclear bomb 
  of a girl out of the country. As a 
  gesture of good faith, he may hand over 
  Zoë’s disarm codes to a particularly 
  persuasive player.
  • 
  Thugs in the night: Directorate agents can 
  grab a player character and threaten him, 
  or sabotage a surveillance operation, 
  or just lurk in the background looking 
  menacing. They could even attempt to 
  warn Gantz if the characters get too 
  close to rescuing Zoë.
  • 
  Official 
  contact: 
  There’s 
  a 
  black 
  telephone in the heart of the Laundry that 
  hasn’t rung since 1989. The Directorate 
  contact the player characters’ superiors 
  and warn them about the on-going mission 
  against a ‘common foe.’ It’s up to the 
  player characters whether or not to back 
  off, or to ignore the Directorate and 
  keep investigating.
  6. Cult Responses
  Gantz has four levels of response, depending on how 
  threatened he feels and how close the Laundry is to exposing 
  the school. In general, move up one rung of the response 
  ladder each time the characters do something that alarms 
  Gantz. Visiting the school might move him up to Alert; 
  questioning a student makes him order Sanitise; breaking 
  into the school provokes him to Escape.
  The Directorate want Gantz to escape. They want him to 
  believe that England is no longer a safe place, and that he 
  
  101
  has to take his prodigy to the safety of Colorado and the 
  cult’s stronghold there. The Laundry is their stalking horse 
  to drive Gantz to America.
  Alert
  This is the lowest level of response. Even if the characters 
  do nothing, then Gantz orders an Alert as soon as he 
  discovers that David Philpott is dead or in custody.
  Added security on all approaches to the school. Vake or 
  one of his men watches all the entrances to the school. The 
  characters may have to make a Hide or Disguise test to 
  avoid being spotted.
  Students are told to report any contact with outsiders. This 
  means that any attempts to question students get reported 
  to the school.
  Members of staff who are not part of the cult are put 
  under observation. Vake does not have enough manpower 
  to follow all the teachers, but he’s already suspicious of Jill 
  Marsham, so he puts two men to shadow her. 
  Cultists investigate anyone who visits the school. Any 
  visitors also get shadowed by Vake’s agents. These thugs 
  follow the visitors home and spy on them. At this stage, they 
  just observe – they won’t attack or threaten the characters.
  Sanitise
  This response level lets the Washlamb Academy stay 
  functioning as a school while hiding any occult elements.
  All students and staff are geased for silence. This is a basic 
  Level One geas, administered en masse as part of religious 
  services by Malcolm Beal. He hides the spell inside the 
  religious ritual; a successful Knowledge (Occult) or 
  Knowledge (Ritual) test spots that he’s casting a spell. The 
  geas prevents the students from answering any questions 
  about the school. 
  Troublesome staff may be sent on another “bus tour to 
  Scotland.” If Gantz suspects any of the staff (like Marsham) 
  to be behind the leaks, he sends them on a team building 
  weekend. Vake then arranges another accident – in this case, 
  the bus carrying the teachers tragically drives off a bridge, 
  killing everyone on board.
  If Gantz still believes the player characters are civilians 
  (school inspectors, concerned parents, private investigators, 
  etc.) as opposed to part of the Laundry, then he dispatches 
  Vake to scare them off or eliminate them. 
  If he’s intimidating the characters, then Vake poses as a 
  religious extremist who’s obsessed with ‘secular saboteurs’. 
  He petrol-bombs the house of one of the characters, and 
  leaves documentation implicating an extremist Christian 
  sect in the attack.
  If he’s got orders to kill, then he distracts the characters 
  with a summoned horror (level 3 nasty thingy), then cloaks 
  himself in invisibility and attacks.
  Any suspect books or documentation in the school are 
  hidden; the secret areas like the Black Pit are sealed and 
  camouflaged. Special studies and training for the gifted 
  students are temporarily suspended.
  Escape
  Gantz prepares to leave the United Kingdom. He contacts 
  the Golden Promise Ministry and arranges for a plane 
  from Heathrow to Colorado. Meanwhile, he destroys all 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  102
  incriminating documentation, has the Black Pit filled in with 
  sand, and removes any cult relics from the school. He also 
  sends Vake to purchase false passports for several students 
  from a black-market fixer called Jorowski.
  When the plane is ready, he brings some of the more 
  promising students (including Zoë Waters) and his inner 
  circle of followers to Heathrow (including a heavily armed 
  Vake) via bus and retreats to the safety of the USA. In an 
  emergency, he can arrange for the Golden Promise jet to 
  land at a disused airfield a short distance from the school 
  instead.
  Intercepting Gantz: Trying to stop Gantz at Heathrow is 
  the worst possible option – no-one wants a hostage crisis 
  at an airport, especially with kids in the line of fire and the 
  potential of hostile magic. A better option is to intercept the 
  bus on the road before it reaches the airport. The characters 
  will have to contend with Vake, but at least they can contain 
  the situation.
  Other possible solutions include taking control of the plane, 
  or stalling Gantz at the airport until the characters can take 
  him out safely and quietly. 
  If the characters stop Gantz from escaping, or convince him 
  that escaping isn’t an option, he jumps straight to “wake the 
  Sleeper, usher in the end of days” – see Apocalypse, below.
  Of course, if the characters follow the Thirteenth 
  Directorate game plan, then they want Gantz to escape. The 
  Golden Promise Ministry will only believe that Zoë Waters 
  is one of the true Elect if if it can snatch her away from 
  the forces of darkness (aka the Laundry) at the last minute. 
  The characters must therefore convince Gantz that they’re 
  desperately trying to stop him, while still giving him an 
  opening to escape.
  Apocalypse
  In this scenario, Gantz believes that there is no chance of 
  escape. He therefore tries to call the Sleeper. As soon as he 
  embarks on this scheme, the Laundry’s Predictive Branch 
  contacts the characters and warns of an impending doom. 
  Something big is coming.
  The gifted and the saved students gather in the church, 
  along with a few choice sacrifices. He stations Vake and a 
  few other trustworthy cultists to guard the doors. 
  Malcolm Beal summons up a few minor exonomes – 
  nothing especially dangerous, but powerful enough to 
  possess the other students and staff and turn them into 
  slavering zombies with glowing worms in their eyes, and 
  enough intelligence to pull the trigger on an assault rifle or 
  a suicide vest. This ad hoc army is ordered to defend the 
  school against any intruders. Without proper binding spells, 
  the summoned entities just try to possess as many people as 
  possible, but that works just as well to occupy the authorities 
  while Gantz completes his actual plan.
  In the church, Gantz sacrifices various staff members and 
  students to open a Gate to the Plateau of the Sleeper, then 
  orders most of the congregation to drink a lethal dose of 
  the psychoactive drug cocktail used to enhance the psychic 
  powers of the gifted. He then puts Zoë Waters on the 
  receptor node of a summoning grid designed to channel 
  the deaths of the gifted students through her, boosting her 
  innate abilities and awakening the Sleeper. 
  At least, that’s the idea. What Gantz doesn’t know is that the 
  Thirteenth Directorate intended for Zoë Waters to be used 
  in a summoning ritual; instead of calling the Sleeper, she’s 
  calling something else in the hierarchy of horrors, a being 
  of seething nuclear chaos that only wants to devour and 
  destroy. The Directorate intended for this alien god to show 
  up and devour some isolated cult compound, but instead it’s 
  going to take a large chunk out of London. 
  Stopping the Ceremony: The easiest way is to stand back, 
  call in the SAS, and hope that Major Barnes and company 
  can blast through the school’s defences before the ritual 
  is finished. This approach means a lot of unnecessary 
  bloodshed, as the SAS will have to kill the possessed victims 
  instead of exorcising them.
  
  103
  If the characters have Zoë’s disarm codes, then they can 
  sneak past the hordes of zombies, eliminate Vake and the 
  other guards, then shout the disarm code just before Zoë’s 
  booby-trap soul is triggered. Alternatively, killing Zoë 
  at the last minute stops a worse horror from devouring 
  London. 
  Aftermath
  What constitutes a win in this adventure? Idealistic players 
  might want to see the Washlamb Trust shut down (a 
  virtual certainty) and Zoë reunited with her ‘aunt’ (unlikely, 
  although exceptionally cunning player characters might be 
  able to convince Karla to defect to be with Zoë). Pragmatists 
  might prefer to see the Directorate’s mission through to its 
  conclusion, with Zoë on her way to the United States to 
  ruin some other cult’s triumph.
  Even if Zoë stops that summoning attempt, that’s just 
  delaying the inevitable. The students in the Academy will 
  never get to grow up. They’re the children of the end times. 
  They’ll come of age in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
  Handout #1  - Newspaper Article
  H
  uman error and fatigue were to blame for the tragic bus crash that claimed 
  sixteen lives, according to coroner Arthur Pollack. This verdict comes 
  as a blow to the family of petrol tanker driver Veno Kanjir, who hoped that 
  the inquest would exonerate him. On November 3rd last year, Kanjir’s petrol 
  tanker collided with a tour bus carrying twelve students and five members of 
  staff from the Washlamb Academy school as they returned from a school trip to 
  Scotland. There were no survivors.
   
  Speaking after the inquest, Principal Cragge said that the inquest was a 
  necessary step in the process of grieving, and that the students and colleagues 
  could now rest peacefully. He also expressed his hope that Kanjir’s family 
  would be able to put the tragedy behind them. “The Lord chose to take our 
  friends from us early – we must trust in His wisdom and His infinite mercy”.
  Coroner reCords 
  VerdiCt on Bus Crash
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  104
  Handout #2  - Laundry incident report
  - - - - I n c I d e n t  R e p o R t  # 0 8 1 2 9 / A - - - -
  HOLMES2 flagged an SCD-1 investigation of a recent homicide for further study. The 
  suspected victim was Karla Waters, a Russian immigrant. She is missing, presumed dead. 
  Neighbours reported sounds of breaking glass and raised voices shouting in Russian and 
  other unfamiliar languages. The police were called, and found that the door to Waters’ 
  apartment had been forced open. They found signs of a struggle, notably:
  Blood splatter marks, consistent with defending against an attacker with a knife.
  A bloodstained silk scarf, similar to those used in ritual killings in northern India. Markings 
  on the scarf include symbols used by the suppressed Thuggee cult of the Yellow Silk Priest. 
  Striations and deposits on the scarf suggest it was used for strangulation.
  Both the blood splatter marks and the bloodstains on the scarf matched the blood type on 
  file for Karla Waters.
  Scrawled on the floor was a magical glyph (Zoroaster Type C invocation), designed to 
  summon an ELMO TWO entity. The Dee-Hamilton arc of the glyph was misaligned, 
  causing the summoning to fail. Presumably, the summoned entity would have incinerated its 
  surroundings and destroyed all evidence of the attack.
  Karla Waters has not been seen since. Local children reported seeing a body in a nearby 
  canal, but police divers have yet to recover any remains.
  Waters’ only known relative is her niece, Zoë Waters. According to immigration records, 
  Karla adopted Zoë after the girl’s parents were murdered. She claimed they were involved 
  with a ‘Tibetan cult,’ and that the Russian army rescued the child and gave her to Waters’ 
  care. The Russian government denies any such involvement. Zoë was absent from the flat 
  on the night of the attack; she is currently in care while the police attempt to trace another 
  relative.
  Analysis: The presence of a summoning glyph implies the involvement of a dangerous 
  cult, perhaps a resurgent Yellow Silk group. I recommend making covert contact with 
  our Russian counterparts to ascertain whether Karla Waters’ account of Tibetan 
  cults and military action had a kernel of truth.
  
  105
  Handout #3  - Telephone call
  Voice 1: Adam Gantz (AG), Vice-Principal of Washlamb Academy
  Voice 2: Unknown American (UA)
  cAll DUrAt ion: 1:22:08
  cAll oriGin: Washlamb Academy.
  cAll Dest inAt ion: Unlisted number, colorado.
  UA: Hello?
  AG: it’s Adam Gantz. something’s come up. i need to talk to them.
  UA: Hold on. What do you have?
  AG: one of the Gifted… she’s chosen of the lord. she dreams of the Pyramid every 
  night. Her oneiromantic readings are astounding. she has the preternatural gifts of 
  eve.
  UA: is she one of the elect?
  AG: it’s the one i told you about, the russian girl. We couldn’t trace her bloodline, 
  and she has none of the Holy Marks, but…
  UA: Many are called, but few are chosen. You know this.
  AG: i know, but… you’ve got to meet her. i think she’s the real thing. the testament 
  promised signs in the last days. it said we would become like them. i think she’s 
  one of the elect despite her mongrel blood. the lord has looked upon her soul and 
  found it pleasing to him.
  UA: Beware of false pride. We’ll do this according to protocol, okay?
  AG: i want to talk to the board. 
  UA: no, it’s too early. We’ve got to test her first. 
  AG: okay, but…
  UA: send me everything you’ve got on her, and be ready to bring her over here if 
  the board agrees to see her. i’ll consult with the pastors; find out what the best 
  course of action is.
  AG: We’ve got to move fast. You know the enemy is at my door.
  UA: Fuck. okay. i’ll put the jet on standby in case we need to bring you home. 
  AG: You do. You do. the time is at hand. He’s coming back, and we are his chosen 
  servants.
  UA: Amen. sit tight. leave things on this end with me. 
  ThINK Of ThE ChILDREN
  Think of the Children
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  106
  This scenario takes place a short time before and after the 
  events of The Apocalypse Codex. The first three scenes take 
  place in London, and are suitable for any characters. The 
  second section involves an air assault on the plateau, and is 
  aimed at tough, experienced Laundry personnel, and at least 
  one of the characters should have excellent Computer Use 
  (Magic), Science (Thaumaturgy) and Sorcery skills. If your 
  regular player characters aren’t up to the grade, then they 
  can make temporary combat-heavy player characters who 
  are ready to kick tombs open and shoot bad guys. Ideally, 
  mix the temporary and regular player characters together so 
  that some of the regulars can go through the Gate, while 
  the other players take SAS shitkickers.
  In the mountain air of Colorado Springs, on a plateau that 
  eerily mirrors another, older, formation, Pastor Raymond 
  Schiller opened up two Gates to the Pyramid of the Sleeper. 
  The first of these Gates stayed open for several weeks, as 
  Schiller’s followers brought back the tongue eater and other 
  holy relics from the Plateau. The second was open only 
  briefly, and was intended to be the way of the Lord as He 
  came forth from His slumber to devour the faithful and 
  make them part of His Divine Body.
   
  Fortunately for humanity, Schiller’s plan to wake the Sleeper 
  failed. BASHFUL INCENDIARY, JOHNNY PRINCE, and 
  BASTARD OPERATOR1 successfully prevented the cult 
  from opening the tomb. They also disabled the area ward that 
  blocked the Black Chamber from squashing the cult.
  The Black Chamber subsequently squashed the cult.
  However, before the Chamber’s dark-cloaked goons swooped 
  in, some of the cultists made it through the Gate. They’re 
  now loose on the Plateau. Someone has to go clean them up.
  The Chosen
  The path of the righteous man is beset by many evils. 
  Schiller knew that Plan A – find another member of the 
  Elect in whom the old blood still ran pure enough to hold 
  open the Gate – was risky, but God’s on a tight schedule and 
  the Golden Promise couldn’t delay. Therefore, he prepared 
  a backup plan to ensure that if he failed, the Sleeping Christ 
  might still be awoken in accordance with the prophecies. 
  Among the worshippers at Colorado Springs was a group 
  of specially trained devotees, called the Chosen. To them, 
  Schiller entrusted a special mission. 
  The Plateau touches our world sometimes, drifting into 
  alignment and then falling away again. The task of the 
  Chosen is to drag it back into conjunction and bind it there, 
  bringing the Pyramid physically back to Earth. The Golden 
  Promise believe that the Sleeping Christ will awaken when 
  He can no longer ignore the cries of billions of suffering 
  humans, so the mission of the Chosen is bring Christ to 
  Earth and make those cries into a deafening chorus.
  The Chosen are all young, committed members of the 
  Church. They’re all familiar with sorcery and computational 
  demonology, and they’ve all committed the Apocalypse 
  Codex to memory. Schiller sent twelve of them through, 
  apostles to the Sleeping Christ. Four have military training; 
  six are ‘Saved’ through the intercession of the tongue-eaters, 
  and the last two are Schiller’s chosen disciples.
  Without Schiller, they can’t risk crossing the Wall of Pain. 
  They’ve got a different target.
  The Dmu Thag of  Nyatri Tsenpo
  According to Tibetan legend, the first king of Tibet was 
  Nyatri Tsenpo, who descended from Heaven and was 
  worshipped as a god by the Tibetans. Tsenpo possessed 
  many mythic qualities – his hands were webbed, and his 
  eyelids closed from the bottom of the eye, like a nictating 
  membrane. He claimed to be the scion of a monster called 
  a theurang, said to a one-legged beast with a huge flapping 
  tongue. Most prodigious of all, Nyatri Tsenpo was immortal. 
  When his son, Mutri Tsenpo, came of age, Nyatri Tsenpo 
  returned to heaven by means of a magical silver cord, his 
  dmu thag. All the kings were linked to heaven by these cords, 
  until the eighth king, Drigum Tsenpo quarrelled with his 
  horsegroom. His cord got severed in the fight, preventing 
  the king from ascending into heaven. Drigum Tsenpo was 
  buried in the Earth,2 and from then on his descendants died 
  naturally as mortals do instead of climbing into the heavens 
  on their dmu thag cords.
  The Moral high Ground
  The situation may be non-survivable.
  — The Apocalypse Codex
  1. This isn’t actually Bob’s codename, but he really, really, really wishes it was.
  2. Well, “encased in a hundred concentric copper vessels and chucked in a river that flows into an abyss,” actually. Because that’s how you honour a king, 
  and not how you deal with something dangerously radioactive.
  
  107
  The Chosen
  The Swords of Christ: The four Swords of 
  Christ were recruited from the Air Force 
  Academy near Colorado Springs. They’re all 
  loyal members of the church, but they’re 
  not elite Special Forces or trained in Gate 
  travel – they just occupy the intersection of 
  two circles marked ‘access to weapons’ and 
  ‘willing to die for the cause.’ 
  STR 14 CON 13 SIZ 13 INT 11 POW 10
  DEX 11 CHA 9 
  EDU 15 SAN 40 HP 13 (8)
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Remington 700 Sniper Rifle 45%, damage 
  2d8
  Colt M16A4 Rifle 50%, 1d10
  Knife 40%, damage 1d3+1+db
  Armour: Ballistic vest (8 points)
  Artefacts: Class 2 Ward
  Skills: Climb 60%, Demolition 50%, Dodge 45%, 
  Hide 40%, Spot 40%, Stealth 50%.
  Note that the soldiers start out at reduced 
  Hit Points, due to the life-draining effects 
  of the Plateau. 
  The Tongues of Christ: Those who were ‘Saved’ 
  by the tongue eaters are less vulnerable 
  to the terrible proximity of the Sleeping 
  Christ. His glory does not sap their life 
  force, nor does his glorious presence drive 
  them insane. The Saved can move relatively 
  freely on the Plateau. These six tongues of 
  Christ were specially chosen by Schiller for 
  this great purpose. Unlike most of the Saved, 
  their Hosts have not devoured the souls of 
  these six victims – they need those souls 
  to awaken Nyatri Tsenpo and the other Dead 
  Kings. The Tongues shall profess the glory of 
  the Lord, as their trapped souls are consumed 
  by the children of the Lord.
  STR 16 CON 16 SIZ 12 INT 8 
  POW 8
  DEX 11 CHA 8 
  EDU 10 SAN 0 
  HP 14
  Damage Bonus: +1d4
  Weapons: Beretta Mod 92FS Handgun 50%, damage 
  1d10
  Knife 40%, damage 1d3+1+db
  Skills: Hide 50%, Stealth 60%, Lick Lips 
  Disconcertingly 60%.
  All of the Tongues of Christ have tongue-
  eater larvae inside them (see page 45).
  The Hands of Christ: The two designated Hands 
  of Christ are Aldar Jacobs and Louisa Perrin.
  Jacobs was an independent sorcerer and a 
  worshipper of Yog-Sothoth until he found Jesus 
  a few years ago. Now he’s got the zeal of a 
  convert, and put his genuine occult knowledge 
  to work in the service of the Church. Schiller 
  valued Jacobs’ insight into sorcery and 
  computational demonology, and chose him to 
  lead this mission to the Dead Plateau. Jacob 
  refuses to admit it to himself, but he knows 
  that there’s only One True Religion, and the 
  thing in the Pyramid isn’t going to save 
  anyone. His manic determination to carry out 
  Schiller’s commands is his way of distracting 
  himself from the truth.
  STR 11 CON 15 SIZ 14 INT 16 POW 14
  DEX 13 CHA 13 EDU 17 SAN 30 HP 15 (12)
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Weapons: Beretta Mod 92FS Pistol Handgun 65%, 
  1d10
  Knife 40%, damage 1d3+1+db
  Armour: Ballistic vest (8 points)
  Artefacts: Class 3 Ward, Laptop.
  Skills: Computer Use (Magic) 45%, Disguise 
  50%, 
  Dodge 
  40%, 
  Drive 
  55%, 
  Knowledge 
  (Tradecraft) 40%, Knowledge (Occult) 60%, 
  Sorcery 60%, Spot 60%, Ignore Reality 70%, 
  Crazy Rambling Rants 60%
  By contrast, Louisa Perrin was born into the 
  Golden Promise, and was raised on a combination 
  of occult lore and Christian Dominionism. 
  She showed promise as a mathematician and a 
  sorcerer, so she was groomed as one of the Golden 
  Promise Ministry’s special missionaries. She 
  lacks Jacobs’ field experience, but the rest 
  of the cultists consider her more trustworthy 
  than a former pagan blasphemer. 
  STR 10 CON 12 SIZ 11 INT 16 POW 15
  DEX 11 CHA 13 EDU 15 SAN 20 HP 12 (8)
  Damage Bonus: +0
  Weapons: Colt M16A4 Rifle 40%, 1d10
  Knife 40%, damage 1d3+1+db
  Armour: Ballistic vest (8 points)
  Artefacts: Class 2 Ward
  Skills: Computer Use (Magic) 30%, Dodge 45%, 
  Knowledge (Religion) 50%, Knowledge (Occult) 
  30%, Sorcery 45%, Spot 50%.
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  108
  Schiller’s researchers suspect that Nyatri Tsenpo and his 
  offspring possessed the blood of the Elect. Those dmu 
  thag cords are psychic links between the world of the 
  Sleeping Christ and our mortal existence. If they could be 
  reactivated, then the primordial kings of Tibet would drag 
  the Plateau back into alignment with Earth. 
  There’s a fabled monastery within sight of the Dead Plateau. 
  Schiller suspects that monastery is the last resting place of 
  Nyatri Tsenpo.
  Schiller’s researchers suspect that Nyatri Tsenpo and his 
  offspring possessed the blood of the Elect. Those dmu 
  thag cords are psychic links between the world of the 
  Sleeping Christ and our mortal existence. If they could be 
  reactivated, then the primordial kings of Tibet would drag 
  the Plateau back into alignment with Earth. 
  There’s a fabled monastery within sight of the Dead Plateau. 
  Schiller suspects that monastery is the last resting place of 
  Nyatri Tsenpo.
  1. A Distant Trumpet
  The Laundry maintains a document codenamed IVORY 
  TRUMPET, but it’s usually referred to as the “I never” 
  file, short for “I never believed my work could have 
  practical applications.” It’s a list of academics, researchers, 
  collectors, artists and other specialists who are experts 
  in some incredibly obscure field – like, say, violin repair, 
  or the history of hanging and execution, or the acoustics 
  and manufacture of church bells – that 
  may be of use to the Laundry, or to 
  some competitor. (Mo was on that list, 
  for example). Twenty or thirty percent 
  of the ‘I never’ crowd end up getting 
  recruited by the Laundry in some 
  capacity, and they keep tabs on the rest. 
  Just in case.
  Tenzil Gyatso is a recent addition to 
  the list. He’s a Tibetan historian and 
  translator who fled the region six years 
  ago, and is now writing and teaching in 
  London. The Laundry tagged him for I 
  never when he arrived, added his name 
  to the watch list, and then forgot about 
  him.
  Mission	Briefing
  The scenario kicks off with the player 
  characters’ supervisor dumping a huge 
  stack of pointless busywork vitally important work on the 
  characters. Everything in the stack requires a field-qualified 
  officer, but it’s all tedious stuff that makes counting 
  the concrete cows in Milton Keynes seem exciting and 
  important. The characters have to go down into the sewers 
  and renew the wards on an iron door that was last opened 
  in 1842; they’ve got to replace the silver ball-bearings in the 
  eternally-running spiral escalator3 behind a secret door in 
  Holloway Road tube station; they’ve got to meet with some 
  recently-promoted Metropolitan Police officers and explain 
  the sort of situations they should call the Laundry in to 
  deal with, without mentioning what the Laundry is or giving 
  away anything about the occult; check in on the server 
  room at Transport for London to make sure the sigils on 
  the SCORPION STARE servers4 are still up and running. 
  Occult busywork, basically.
  The last item on the list is to check in with Tenzil Gyatso. 
  Two days ago, he complained to the police that someone 
  broke into his flat while he was out. The police logged a 
  report, and that tripped the Laundry’s keyword search.
  Playing Gyatso
  Gyatso is a pot-bellied man in his mid-fifties, with a stringy 
  white beard. He’s an absent-minded academic, and ever 
  since his wife’s death, he’s taken little care of himself. 
  Gyatso’s convinced that the Chinese government is spying 
  on him; he’s friends with dissidents and other critics of 
  Chinese policy towards Tibet. He’s therefore cranky that the 
  police didn’t take his break-in seriously. 
  3. They actually built a mechanical spiral escalator. It didn’t work.
  4. Try saying that six times fast. Actually, don’t – it might summon something. 
  
  109
  He hasn’t signed Section III (or any of the Official Secrets 
  Act), and isn’t aware of magic or the Laundry. 
  • 
  Gyatso complains about everything. He assumes the 
  player characters are police and berates them for taking 
  so long.
  • 
  He talks with his hands. Gesture wildly.
  • 
  He’s obsessed with his new smartphone, and uses it 
  for everything. If the characters give him a business 
  card, he’ll photograph it and stick it on Evernote. If 
  they ask about Tibetan history, he’ll pull up pdfs of his 
  publications and email them instead of bothering with 
  hardcopies.
  Gyatso’s Flat
  Tenzil Gyatso’s flat is a small one-bedroom apartment on 
  the eight floor of a housing block. The elevator’s broken. 
  By the time the characters arrive, it’s early evening.  His flat, 
  by contrast, is spotlessly clean, but disorganised. Stacks of 
  papers on ninth century Tibetan legends jostle for space 
  with reference books and piles of magazines. 
  • 
  A Spot rolls notices an oddly out-of-place flyer in a stack 
  of letters – it’s a flyer from the Golden Promise Ministry, 
  calling the faithful to a big Christian prayer meeting in 
  the O2 Arena. (It was delivered by the two GPM would-
  be kidnappers during an initial scouting pass).
  The Break-In 
  According to Gyatso, the break-in happened two days ago. 
  He employs a cleaner, Mrs. Watson, who comes around 
  twice a week to tidy the flat. She says two young men leaving 
  the flat. She shouted at them, and they fled – she didn’t 
  get a look at their faces, but both were white, clean-shaven 
  and well-dressed. One of them had a briefcase. Mrs. Watson 
  called Gyatso, and he called the police.
  As far as he can tell, nothing’s missing. He suspects that the 
  intruders were planting bugs.
  A quick search of the apartment turns up the following 
  clues:
  • 
  The door wasn’t forced, but the lock is a cheap one 
  and there are small scratches that imply the use of a 
  snap gun (a lockpicking device). Anyone with Fine 
  Manipulation spots this clue. 
  • 
  A scan with a thaumometer or a scrying spell coupled 
  with a successful Science (Thaumaturgy) roll reveals 
  the lingering taint of magic. Some sort of low-level 
  binding field, from the look of it.
  • 
  A successful Hide check finds some shards of 
  something like an eggshell under Gyotso’s bed. 
  Knowledge (Natural History) or Science (Zoology) 
  rolls suggests that it might be an insect egg. 
  The Missing Mrs. Watson
  Canny or paranoid characters may want to check up on Mrs. 
  Watson. She lives nearby. Or, rather, lived. Checking her flat, 
  there’s no sign of her.
  • 
  Asking the neighbours reveals that she was visited 
  last night by two young men. She left with them, and 
  seemed to recognise them.
  • 
  A quick search reveals blood in the sink and toilet. 
  It looks like she spat up a considerable amount of 
  blood. 
  What Really Happened?
  The Golden Promise sent three of their 
  faithful to acquire Gyatso. The team’s 
  leader is Aldar Jacob (see page 107), one 
  of Schiller’s trusted lieutenants. He’s a 
  devoted servant of the Sleeping Christ, 
  with a natural talent for spellcasting. 
  Under him, he’s got two clean-cut young men 
  named Chris Hollander and Lewis Kyrl (Aldar 
  Jacobs ideally needs to survive to move on 
  Flyover Country, but you can kill off Chris 
  and Lewis if you want). She’s also got a 
  tongue eater larva.
  Chris and Lewis broke into Gyatso’s flat 
  under orders from Aldar Jacobs. They 
  planted a tongue eater hatchling there 
  under the academic’s bed. The plan was for 
  the creature to wake up, Save Gyotso, and 
  then bring him to the Golden Promise. 
  Unfortunately, Mrs. Watson woke the creature 
  up first. It ate her tongue instead. The 
  cultists followed the hatchling’s psychic 
  scream of confusion, and collected the now-
  Saved Watson from her flat.
  Gyatso’s Work
  If the characters ask about Gyatso’s research, he explains 
  that he specialises in the Zhang Zhung period of Tibetan 
  prehistory. He’ll happily ramble on about it for hours. He 
  mentions Nyatri Tsenpo and the prehistoric kings, but 
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
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  110
  only as part of a larger story. Unless the characters have 
  good scores in Knowledge (Occult) or some other skill 
  like Knowledge (History) or Knowledge (Religion), 
  most of this is way over their heads. However, an Idea 
  roll later in the  adventure can bring back memories of 
  Gyotso’s work.
   
  If pressed, he mentions an odd incident last week. A young 
  American man who introduced herself as Aldar Jacobs 
  contacted him and invited him to give a guest lecture at 
  a private function in Colorado. He was hazy about who 
  exactly was hosting this private function, but he got the 
  impression that it was something religious. He said no – 
  he loathes travelling to the United States. The American 
  seemed disappointed, and left Gyatso a phone number with 
  which to contact him. If the characters check it, it goes to a 
  pay-as-you-go disposable mobile phone.
  Securing Gyatso
  It’s up to the characters whether or not they take Gyatso’s 
  account seriously. The next scene assumes that they put 
  Gyotso under surveillance; if they ignore the Tibetan, then 
  you’ll need to adapt the next scene to suit.
   
  The most budget-efficient approach is just to give Gyatso 
  a direct phone number so he can call the Laundry for help. 
  Paranoid characters may prefer to install a bug or a ward, or 
  to watch the flat.
  2. The Saved and the Lost
  A day later, the cult makes a second attempt to secure 
  Tenzin Gyatso. This second attempt relies on Mrs. Watson; 
  she’s one of the Saved now, with a juvenile tongue eater 
  in her mouth, and is only too willing to help. The plan is a 
  simple one:
  • 
  Mrs. Watson contacts Gyatso, explaining that she 
  unexpectedly had to visit her sister, who had fallen ill. 
  She’s going back to her sister for the weekend, so she 
  wants to come to Gyatso’s flat this afternoon to clean it. 
  (She picks a time when Gyatso is certain to be present.)
  • 
  The two GPM goons drive her to Gyatso’s building in 
  a small van. Aldar follows in a second car.
  • 
  Mrs. Watson goes to Gyatso’s flat. She then pulls a gun 
  on him and escorts him out, grabbing his passport en 
  route.
  • 
  The two GPM goons follow them out. Everyone piles 
  into the van. The tongue eater leaves Mrs. Watson and 
  Saves Gyatso.
  • 
  They drive to Heathrow and fly to Colorado, leaving 
  the van in the long-term car park with Watson’s corpse 
  in the back. By the time anyone notices the smell, the 
  Sleeping Christ will have returned and we’ll be well into 
  Tentacle Rapture territory. 
  Taken by the Cleaner
  So, what preparation, if any, did the characters make for 
  Gyatso’s protection?
  • 
  If they just gave him a panic button or a phone number 
  to ring, then he triggers it while talking to Mrs. Watson. 
  The characters may get to hear the cleaner threatening 
  Gyatso and ordering him to find his passport. 
  • 
  If they’ve got his flat under surveillance, then they can 
  intercept the Golden Promise cultists before they get 
  to Gyatso. 
  • 
  If the characters made no preparation at all, then the 
  first time that they hear of Gyatso’s plight is when one 
  of his neighbours calls the police, saying she saw him 
  being mugged at gunpoint just outside her home. By 
  the time the characters get there, he and the cultists are 
  long gone, but they can get a picture of Aldar Jacobs 
  via CCTV cameras in the area.
  Getting Gyatso is not a major priority for the Golden 
  Promise – his knowledge of the Tibetan Kings would be 
  
  111
  useful, but they’re prepared to activate the dmu thug without 
  him if necessary. 
  The Chase
  If the characters have the opportunity to intercept the 
  cultists, then it’s going to be a chase scene, either on foot 
  or by car. Mrs. Watson, Chris and Lewis are all armed, and 
  Mrs. Watson can use her unassuming appearance to her 
  advantage. She looks like a sixty-year old blue rinse brigade 
  housekeeper, not an international terrorist, as long as no-
  one examines her tongue too closely.
  Aldar hangs back. In a car chase, he’ll try to tailgate the 
  player characters; in a foot chase, he might ‘accidentally’ 
  block the player characters. 
  Possible hazards:
  • 
  On a narrow street, the van slows down enough for 
  Chris to take a shot at the player characters
  • 
  Mrs. Watson hurls herself out of the back of the van, 
  trying to smash into the player character’s vehicle and 
  make it look like they ran over an old lady. The tongue 
  eater will grab the first bystander or paramedic who 
  gets too close.
  • 
  Similarly, if the player characters try to restrain Mrs. 
  Watson, the tongue eater abandons her body and goes 
  for a player character instead. 
  Chris & Lewis, Servants of the 
  Sleeping Christ
  Mrs. Watson, Saved Housekeeper 
  For Aldar’s statistics, see page 107.
  Cleaning Up
  Ideally, Aldar gets away to threaten the player characters in 
  the next scene. If Chris and Lewis are arrested, then they 
  can be interrogated, but they’re pretty much designated 
  mushrooms in fanatical faith sauce. They can identify 
  Aldar, but otherwise will just clam up and give no more 
  useful information. They know next to nothing, and 
  can’t even be connected directly to the Golden Promise 
  – they think they’re working for the Sword of Christ, an 
  extremist sect, and that Gyatso was going to supply Jacobs 
  with weapons.
  3. Flyover Country
  Time passes. The characters go back to their usual duties. 
  The events of The Apocalypse Codex occur. Persephone 
  investigates the Golden Promise Ministry, Bob flies off 
  to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Religious 
  Crazies, Colorado vanishes behind a magical veil... and far, 
  far away, the Sleeper stirs.
  In the aftermath of GOD GAME BLACK, a CODICIL 
  BLACK SKULL flight scrambles to conduct a surveillance 
  run of the Pyramid. The White Elephants still aren’t 
  ready to fly, but they’ve got the emergency backup flight 
  of a Eurofighter making a supersonic pass through a gate 
  opened by an escort Sentinel R1, and that’s exactly what 
  they do. Less than 48 hours after Bob made it back home, 
  an aircraft from RAF Cosford soared over the Dead Plateau, 
  photographing the Pyramid and the Wall of Pain before 
  circling around and exiting back into our world.
  And four hours after that, the characters find themselves 
  whisked into a very high-level meeting. Lots of military 
  brass from the RAF and SAS, various senior Laundry staff, 
  including half of the BLOODY BARON committee, 
  observers from other agencies, and Angleton sitting at the 
  heart of it all like Banquo’s ghost. The meeting gets right 
  down to business. Victor Chodhury briefly summarises the 
  key events of APOCALYPSE CODEX as he understands 
  them. 
  The Golden Promise Ministry are a religious group with 
  a very unorthodox version of  Christianity, and their bible 
  includes a coded ritual to wake their “Sleeping Christ,” 
  which corresponds to the Sleeper in the Pyramid. 
  Laundry assets prevented a successful ritual, but the cult 
  was able to open multiple Gates to the Dead Plateau 
  and transfer an indeterminate amount of  personnel and 
  material through.
  An RAF captain takes over, and walks everyone through a 
  series of surveillance photos.
  •	
  Photo #1: The skies over the Dead Plateau, just 
  through the Gate. Wilder and more dangerous than 
  usual; yellow-tinged clouds scud across a crowded 
  alien sky. The captain mutters about high winds and 
  turbulence, and how the scouting mission ran into 
  trouble.
  •	
  Photo #2: The Pyramid itself. It looks unchanged – 
  vast and timeless, but with a sense of impending doom. 
  It’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s about to come 
  crashing down on your head.
  •	
  Photo #3: Kirlian photo of the previous view. 
  Thaumic energy explodes out of the Pyramid’s stony 
  flanks like solar flares. The temple on top is too bright 
  to see. Angleton shakes his head quietly. His craggy 
  face is unreadable.
  •	
  Photo #4: The Wall of Pain. Still intact.
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  •	
  Photo #5: A close-up of a section of the wall. A 
  handful of new undead sentinels dressed in sober black 
  suits hang impaled on shiny spikes. Like their century-
  old neighbours in Red Army uniforms, their dead eyes 
  stare at the Pyramid in an eternal vigil. 
  •	
  Photo #6: As the plane banked around to head back 
  towards the Gate, it took a photo of the entire Plateau 
  – and there, bottom right of the frame, are a dozen or 
  so human figures creeping across the barren waste.
  •	
  Photos #7, #8, #9: Close-ups of these intruders. 
  They’re dressed in camo gear and heavy jackets, and 
  each of them carries a heavy backpack – they obviously 
  came prepared for conditions on this dead world. 
  Several carry assault rifles and other firearms; others 
  have scientific equipment. The camera caught them as 
  they scurried for cover when the aircraft’s sonic boom 
  roared through the thin air of the Plateau. One of them 
  is looking straight up at the camera - Aldar Jacobs. 
  Angleton asks the characters to confirm his identity. 
  Everyone assumes that these intruders came through one 
  of the Golden Promise Gates, but it’s nice to know exactly 
  what sort of apocalypse one is dealing with.
  Planning the Mission
  Angleton steeples his fingers. “Options?”
  The RAF captain points out that while Squadron 666’s 
  primary response is not available, a conventional attack is 
  possible. That gets vetoed on the grounds of geological 
  instability – there are mentions of tremors and other seismic 
  events in the report, and while smearing the cultists across 
  the ground with a Brimstone missile is a pleasant thought, 
  it’s too risky. Anyway, this intel is several hours old, and it’ll 
  be several more hours before a response mission can be 
  launched.
  Major Barnes coughs lightly. “What are the chances of 
  opening another Gate to the Plateau?”
  Any player character with Science (Thaumaturgy) of 50% 
  or more or experience in Gates can field that one – not 
  likely. The Gate could open anywhere within hundreds of 
  miles of the target. There’s a lot of magical energy sloshing 
  around the Plateau right now, making an accurate Gate 
  impossible.
  “Parachute insertion, then. Drop a few lads on the ground, 
  track the intruders, take them out. I presume opening a Gate 
  back home should be easier, right?” asks Barnes. Angleton 
  nods. “All right - assume that’s the game plan. Major Barnes, 
  pick your team and come up with a plan to secure and detain 
  a dozen hostiles.”
  Introduce any temporary player characters at this point 
  if you’re using them. Optionally, hand out copies of the 
  briefing document in chapter 5.
  Topics to be discussed: 
  • 
  What are the Golden Promise doing on the Plateau? 
  Judging from the photos, they’re heading away from 
  the Pyramid towards the so-called ‘monastery,’ an 
  unexplored structure at the foot of one of the cliffs 
  leading down off the Plateau. If Aldar Jacobs is part 
  of the Golden Promise group, what does that imply?
  • 
  The cultists are armed and presumably packing magical 
  firepower. What preparations should the team make? 
  How long should they wait before departing? What 
  about backup? What about transport?
  • 
  Where should the team make their drop? Over the 
  monastery? On the Plateau? At a safe distance from 
  either location?
  • 
  Observation flights go in at supersonic speeds to 
  minimise exposure time. For a safe parachute jump, the 
  plane should really be going no faster than 200KPH. 
  For that matter, skydiving uses the Athletics skill; if a 
  character doesn’t have that specialty, then it’s going to 
  be a Difficult Athletics roll to land safely. The SAS can 
  handle tandem jumps, but not at high speed.
  
  113
  • 
  What’s the exit strategy? The Plateau’s normally easy 
  to Gate out of, but recent events have stirred up 
  the luminiferous ether. It should still be possible to 
  make it back to Earth, but the team need to bring the 
  equipment to create a Class Four Gate. 
  If it becomes an issue, the team has a Mission Budget of 
  100.
  Once the team has a rough idea of the plan, it’s off in a 
  helicopter to RAF Cotsford, where there’s a C130 Hercules 
  that’s been hastily fitted with the occult-geometry optics 
  bench needed to open a Gate. As the characters approach, 
  they see Laundry technicians tracing warding spells onto the 
  fuselage. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant Hollins, introduces 
  himself and shows the player characters into the cargo bay. 
  He’s trained on the White Elephants, so flying a Hercules 
  into the mouth of hell will be a new experience for him. 
  He’s not looking forward to spending that much time over 
  the Pyramid, but needs must and so forth.
  The big Hercules usually carries much heavier cargo than a 
  team of parachutists and a Gate generator, so it takes off 
  almost daintily and powers across the Bristol Channel and 
  then out over the Irish Sea. A pair of Tornados escort it out, 
  like shadowy wraiths lurking just beyond the glow of the 
  navigation lights. In the front of the cargo bay, two Laundry 
  necromancers hunch over the Gate generator like gnomish 
  acolytes. One’s got what looks like a theodolite; the other’s 
  got a laptop open, with the plane’s current location overlaid 
  onto a map drawn by eighth century Irish monks. 
  A red light flashes, and the Gate generator activates. The air 
  around the machine ripples, then seems to tear and melt. 
  The plane shudders, and the characters all feel strangely 
  stretched for a moment as they cross millions of light years 
  in an instant (SAN loss of 1/1d4) – and then a sickly violet 
  light bleeds in through the windows, and the characters find 
  themselves in a very different sky. The plane immediately 
  starts rattling as the winds buffet it.
  Welcome to the Dead Plateau.
  4. Through the Gate 
  Hollins’ voice crackles in the characters’ ears. “Transit 
  achieved. Looking for markers... ok, we’re about four hundred 
  klicks off  the beacon, so -”
  Something huge and wormlike slithers out of the clouds 
  and slams into the belly of the Hercules with a wet THUMP.
  One of the Tornado pilots confirms that there’s something 
  big clinging to the outside of the plane. The characters can 
  hear scales scraping off the fuselage. What do they do?
  Ignore It: Does that ever work? The characters sit there 
  while the flying worm-thing thrashes and bites at the 
  outside of the C130. They get treated to several minutes 
  of nerve-wracking horror as the monster continues to rip 
  at the plane until it finally detaches and vanishes into the 
  clouds behind. Two new problems arise in quick succession. 
  First, the plane’s leaking fuel and coolant, and there’s no way 
  it’s going to make a safe pass over the Plateau. The team will 
  have to bail out now and hike across the alien landscape to 
  the target. Second, the worm-thing damaged the Hercules’ 
  hastily-prepared wards. Everyone needs to make immediate 
  Luck rolls. 
  Those who fail have their Wards dropped by one level as 
  something alien tries to claw its way into their skulls. (No 
  ward? You’re possessed! Thank you for playing, and let’s 
  hope that one of your teammates can put a bullet in your 
  skull quickly).
  Oh, by the way, Flight Lieutenant Hollins isn’t wearing a 
  powerful ward. Make a Luck roll for him too (he’s got 
  Luck 70%). If that fails, then he’s got worms in his eyes and 
  someone will have to race up to the cockpit and wrestle him 
  out of the pilot’s seat before the possessor works out how 
  to run its new puppet. 
  Get The Hell Out Of  There: Not necessarily the best 
  plan, but at least they’re doing something. The characters 
  can bail out immediately, leaving the C130 to climb steeply 
  and force the worm-thing to detach. See below for the rules 
  on parachuting, and call for Luck checks as the characters 
  bail out. The character who fails by the biggest margin gets 
  a good look at the worm-thing when it snaps at him. That’s 
  a 1/1d6 SAN loss and a 20% chance of taking 2d6 damage 
  from the monster’s jaws.
  Have A Tornado Shoot It Off: Not exactly what the pilot 
  is trained for, but it’s worth a try. The Tornado carries a 
  Mauser BK27 cannon that can make mincemeat of the 
  worm-thing, but a missed shot could damage the C130. If 
  the characters go for this option, then have one of them 
  roll the Tornado pilot’s Artillery skill of 70%. A success 
  wounds the creature and convinces it to detach; a special 
  success kills it. A failure means that both creature and plane 
  are hit; the monster detaches, but the Hercules can’t make 
  it to the drop zone, so the characters get dropped early. A 
  fumble means that the Tornado misses completely, and fire 
  rakes the cargo bay of the Hercules. Everyone gets to make 
  Luck rolls; those who fail take 1d4 damage from flying 
  shrapnel, and one unlucky NPC gets splattered – oh, and 
  that thing’s still out there. Plan B?
  Shoot It Off: The creature is close to one of the side 
  doors; if Hollins slows down, and everyone’s strapped in, 
  then some brave soul could try crawling out there with a 
  machine gun and blasting the monster. The lucky volunteer 
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
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  GOD GAME BLACK
  114
  gets to go toe-to-toe – or muzzle to slavering maw – with 
  the creature. Firing in such conditions is Difficult; inflicting 
  10 or more damage on the creature convinces it to leave.
  Banish It: It’s just on the other side of that wall. If the 
  characters fire a banishing spell, it might convince the 
  worm-thing to leave. The downside of this plan is two-fold. 
  First, you’d need a chunky banishment spell (Level Three at 
  least). Secondly, the airframe is warded. The characters can 
  take down the wards for just long enough to cast the spell, 
  but that exposes the crew as described above under Ignore it.
  The Thing On The Plane, 
  Elephantine Mount 
  Characteristic 
  Rolls 
  Averages
   
  STR 
  4d6 +20 
  34
   
  CON 
  2d6 +6 
  13
   
  SIZ 
  4d6 +36 
  50
   
  INT 
  1d6 
  3-4
   
  POW 
  3d6 
  11-12
   
  DEX 
  2d6+3 
  10
  Move: 6/30 Flying 
  HP: 32
  Average Damage Bonus: +4d6
  Weapons: Bite 55%, damage 2d6+2+db
  Armour: 9-point hide
  Sanity Loss: 0/1d6
  Drop Zone
  If it’s still flying, the C130 continues towards the Dead 
  Plateau. The “prepare to jump” light flickers into life. There 
  are several possible drop zones. The characters can choose 
  any of them, assuming the Hercules isn’t damaged.
  Making a parachute jump requires Athletics (Skydiving). 
  Characters who don’t have that skill can just make a Difficult 
  Athletics roll. Jumping in tandem with another character 
  is also Difficult. A failed parachuting roll means the jumper 
  suffers 1d4 damage on the landing. A fumbled roll has 
  added problems, as described below.
  The drop zones are: 
  •	
  Directly Over The Monastery: Skip most of scene 5, 
  Across the Dead Plateau, and jump straight to Welcoming 
  Committee on page 116. The Golden Promise cultists 
  take pot shots at the player characters as they parachute 
  down. The range means the the cultists’ attacks are at 
  1/8th of their normal. Make one attack roll on each 
  player character. A Fumbled roll means the character 
  presents the perfect target as he falls outlined against 
  the lurid starry sky; the cultists get to make 1d3 attacks 
  at ½ their normal attack skill.
  •	
  Edge of  the Dead Plateau: This gives the characters 
  some cover from the cultists in the Monastery while 
  minimising travel time. A failed roll means the character 
  drifts over the edge of the cliff and ends up separated 
  from the rest of the team. A Fumbled roll means the 
  same, plus another 1d6 damage as the character falls 
  even further. 
  •	
  On The Dead Plateau: The team land on the Plateau, 
  a short hike from the edge. This is the safest landing 
  zone. A Fumbled roll here means the character lands 
  much too close to the Wall of Pain, and gets attacked 
  by 1d4 zombies. 
  •	
  Far Off  Course: The characters fall short of the 
  Plateau entirely, and have a long march ahead of them 
  to get to the Monastery. A fumbled roll means the 
  character drifts off course; finding him (or finding your 
  way back to the rest of the team) requires a successful 
  Navigation roll.
  5. Across the Dead Plateau
  The alien landscape of the Dead Plateau surrounds the 
  characters. The lower gravity means the rocks pile themselves 
  at angles that would be impossible on Earth, and look like 
  looming shapes or reaching claws. Overhead, the first storm 
  in centuries rages wildly. The air has a gunpowder tang, 
  and breathing too deep makes the characters feel ill. In the 
  distance, they can feel the terrible attention of the Sleeper in 
  the Pyramid. It has an Eye, and it’s watching them.
  Crossing the Plateau is perilous, as described on page 39. 
  The longer the characters spend on the Plateau, the more 
  it saps their souls. Every three hours (or portion thereof), 
  the characters lose SAN (1/1d6) and Hit Points (1d4-Ward 
  strength). Keep track of how many times the characters get 
  hit by this draining effect – it also determines how many 
  dead kings the Golden Promise manage to awaken.
  Their exposure to the dead world depends on where they 
  landed:
  •	
  Directly Over The Monastery: Hit them once 
  with SAN/Hit Point drain as they’re exploring the 
  Monastery.
  •	
  Edge of  the Plateau: If they rappel down, then hit 
  them twice – once as they cross the valley and again as 
  they’re exploring the Monastery. If they take a longer 
  route, then they get hit three times. 
  •	
  On The Plateau: As per Edge of the Plateau, plus an 
  extra hit as they cross the plateau.
  •	
  Far Off  Course: Five hits. Ouch. 
  
  115
  Getting Down To The Valley
  There are two possible routes down from the Dead Plateau 
  to the valley below. The most direct route is to rappel 
  down the cliff face opposite the Monastery and cross the 
  broken ground below. The safer, but much longer route is 
  to find one of the places where the steep sides give way to 
  somewhat more gentle inclines – less climbing, but a longer 
  walk there and back.
  Climbing down the cliff face requires a Climb test for 
  each character. If successful, the character makes it down 
  without difficulty. If the test fails, then that character gets 
  into trouble and someone (either that character, or someone 
  else who comes to help him) must make another Climb 
  roll. If this second roll fails, then the character (or both 
  characters) fall. A Fumble on any Climb roll means the 
  character automatically falls. A falling character must make 
  a Luck roll. Success means the character only falls a short 
  distance, and takes 1d6 damage. Failure means a longer fall 
  for 3d6 damage.
  Encounters & Events
  Throw in one or more of the following encounters as the 
  characters cross the Dead Plateau.
  •	
  Discarded Gear: The characters find a backpack 
  abandoned by the Golden Promise cultists. Inside, they 
  find food, water and medical supplies, as well as a GPS 
  locator, a satellite phone and maps of the Himalayas. 
  The GPS locator and the phone obviously don’t work 
  on this alien world, so why bring them? 
  •	
  Dead Man Walking: One of the Golden Promise 
  cultists succumbed to the life-draining effects of the 
  Plateau. The other cultists left the body behind, and now 
  it’s inhabited by a hungry ghost. The zombie stumbles 
  towards the player characters, trying to possess them 
  too. This close to the Pyramid, the zombie is more 
  powerful than the average Residual Human Resource – 
  use the Tough Zombie statistics on page 48.
  •	
  Quake: The ground shudders in an oddly mechanical 
  way, as if aeon-old machinery buried deep beneath 
  the surface suddenly quivered into life. The characters 
  may stumble and fall harmlessly – unless they’re doing 
  something dangerous like scaling a cliff or trying to 
  sneak up on the Monastery.
  •	
  Shrine of  Kings: The characters come across a 
  pile of stones. On close examination, they notice 
  that some of the stones bear weathered carvings. A 
  successful Knowledge roll using a suitable speciality 
  like Archaeology, Anthropology or Art History 
  identifies the style as Tibetan; it’s a grave marker. 
  •	
  Hungry Ghosts: A flock of hungry ghosts descends 
  on the characters. These are level three possessor 
  entities. The ghosts are slow-moving and easily 
  confused, so the characters can flee the area or try 
  banishing the ghosts. 
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  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  116
  •	
  Strange Tracks: The characters find a set of 
  footprints in the dust. They’re clearly of recent origin. 
  A successful Track roll identifies them as bootprints, 
  probably from a handmade boot – definitely not one 
  with a rubber sole, anyway. These tracks were actually 
  left by Shamar, the Shepherd (see page 118).
  The Dmu Thag
  While the characters cross the Dead Plateau, 
  the Golden Promise are busy awakening the 
  psychic links of seven dead kings. 
  As each dmu thag cord is energised by a 
  human sacrifice, it drags the world of the 
  Ssleeper closer to congruence with Earth. 
  This progression towards apocalypse is 
  marked by the following events:
  Thaumic 
  Spike: 
  Any 
  character 
  with 
  a 
  thaumometer detects a sudden spike in 
  background energy as each cord activates. 
  Cords in the Sky: Looking through a 
  Tillinghast Resonator, or with Second 
  Sight, or through some other means of 
  seeing the Other Place lets the characters 
  see the cords writhing in the sky over 
  the monastery. Of course, looking into the 
  Other Place hear means seeing... other 
  things. (SAN Loss of 1/1d8).
  Gravity Shifts: As the Plateau comes into 
  congruence with our world, the lighter 
  gravity of the dead world sometimes gives 
  way to the stronger gravity of Earth. 
  Mountain Wind: A cold, but refreshing 
  breeze blows past the characters. It smells 
  like snow and mountain air. 
  Alien Dawn: The air grows progressively 
  warmer, and the characters feel a source 
  of heat rising in the sky. They can’t see 
  it, not yet, but the sun of Earth is rising 
  over the Himalayan mountains and its heat 
  filters through the growing Gate.
  Welcoming Committee
  The Golden Promise assumed that the forces of Satan 
  would come after them as they tried to bring God to Earth. 
  They’ve got a pair of snipers stationed in the rocky heights 
  near the monastery, ready to bring down anyone who might 
  try to stop the ritual.
  If the characters parachuted down near the monastery, then 
  the cultists get to shoot at them as they fall, as described on 
  page 114.
  However, if they landed elsewhere, there’s a chance that 
  they spot the snipers before the shooting starts. If a player 
  declares they’re looking for signs of bad guys, then it’s a 
  straight Spot roll; otherwise, it’s a Difficult Spot roll. If 
  the roll succeeds, the characters spot one of the snipers 
  scrambling into position. 
  Under Fire: The snipers are armed with Remington 700s 
  which have an optimum range of 100 metres (200 metres 
  with a scope, which both rifles have) and deal 2d8 damage 
  on a hit. The rifles have a four-shot magazine, so the snipers 
  have to spend two rounds reloading after firing four shots.
   
  The snipers both have military training, but they’re young 
  Air Force cadets, not veteran soldiers. 
  The snipers start firing as soon as the characters come 
  within 300 metres, making their initial shots Difficult. They’ll 
  aim to boost their chances of hitting, gaining +20% per 
  round spent aiming. They’ve also got tripods, which give 
  another +20% to their attack rolls, but this bonus is lost if 
  they’re forced to move. 
  Sneaking Past: The flat valley floor offers little cover, but 
  the characters can try dodging between the rocks near the 
  base of the plateau, or making a break for the broken ground 
  in front of the monastery. Hiding on the open valley floor 
  is Difficult; hiding amid the rocks or in the broken ground is 
  average difficulty, but the broken ground starts 150 metres 
  away from the monastery. A successful Hide test must be 
  made each round to avoid exposure to the snipers.
  Counter-Sniping: The characters can try shooting back 
  with their own sniper rifles. As soon as the shooting starts, 
  the Golden Promise gunmen try to cover each other (one 
  fires, then the other watches for someone trying to counter-
  snipe). The Golden Promise snipers have cover in the rocks, 
  making any attacks on them Difficult.
  Occult Countermeasures: Clever characters can use magic 
  to deal with the snipers. Obviously, spell like Defensive 
  Bindings are a must in any firefight, but the characters could 
  also use a Hand of Glory to hide from the snipers, or cast 
  an Entropy Manipulation spell to give everyone cover. They 
  could also sic a hungry ghost or other summoned monster 
  on the snipers, or just blast the whole hillside with a full-
  power basilisk gun attack.
  Past the Snipers: Once the characters get past the snipers, a 
  quick search of the area confirms that the Goldem Promise 
  went into the strange ‘monastery.’
    
  
  117
  On the off-chance that the characters manage to capture 
  one of the snipers alive, then he starts babbling about 
  how the ‘Kings of  the Elect’ will soon awaken and ‘bring the 
  suffering masses before the throne of  the Sleeping Christ’.
  6. The Lamaserie
  Up close, the characters can tell that this ‘monastery’ was 
  built to a more human scale than the titanic Pyramid. In 
  fact, it looks like it was built by human hands, although it 
  was clearly carved from the stone of the Plateau. It consists 
  of six stepped concentric levels that support a cylindrical 
  tower. The only visible entrance is through a yawning empty 
  doorway.
  Inside, the characters discover intricate paintings and 
  carvings on the walls. Again, a character with a suitable 
  Knowledge can identify them as being similar to those from 
  the Zhang Zhung period of Tibetan history. The carvings 
  mostly depict smiling monster-kings dismembering humans 
  or being worshipped as gods, or show the proper way to 
  propitiate these hungry deities. Either way, examining the 
  walls is worth 1/1d4 Sanity.
  There’s no sign of the Golden Promise cultists, and the 
  monastery is a maze of small, lightless dusty chambers 
  containing clay jars and cryptic pieces of warped metal. 
  Other rooms contain hundreds of parchment scrolls that 
  crumble to dust when touched. The Golden Promise must 
  be in here somewhere, though.
  The Haunted Monastery
  The monastery, and the catacombs beneath 
  it, are not safe places. Dimensions shift 
  and contract here, and angles change 
  depending on your point of view. What 
  seemed like a short corridor when you 
  walked down it become a long and winding 
  one on the way back; a room that seemed 
  small is actually much bigger now that 
  you’re inside it. 
  The characters hear impossible echoes, 
  see movements in the shadows, and get 
  buffeted by waves of nausea or strange 
  emotions (of which hunger and a strange 
  longing for a specific place in the night 
  sky are the most common, or at least the 
  most recognisable).
  There’s a lot of magical energy here, giving 
  a +3 POW bonus to all spells. 
  The Recent Carvings
  Another corridor has carvings on the walls that seem to 
  depict the history of the ancient kings. The characters can 
  identify several distinct panels:
  • 
  A strange entity, possibly a hooded monk, in front of 
  the Pyramid of the Sleeper, arms raised in veneration.
  • 
  The same hooded entity coupling with a human 
  woman. It looks like there are humans worshipping the 
  hooded entity.
  • 
  Seven sets of virtually identical panels, which the 
  characters recognise as the kings described by Gyatso, 
  starting with Nyatri Tsenpo. The inhuman king comes 
  down to Earth, rules for a period, sires an heir, and 
  then returns to the Pyramid via a strange cord that 
  emerges from his head. At the end of each reign, the 
  carving depicts the king being interred into a coffin-
  like object beneath the monastery.
  • 
  The eighth panel shows the death of Drigum Tsenpo. 
  He fights with his servants, and one of them picks up 
  the king’s sword and uses it to cut the psychic cord. 
  • 
  Below each of the histories of the seven previous kings, 
  there’s a large panel of some sort of text. Any character 
  with Sorcery or Knowledge (Occult) 50% or more 
  recognises it as the Language of Leng, an occult 
  tongue best used for (a) entering into ghastly bargains 
  with inhuman powers or (b) writing a compiler that 
  translates from C to the underlying structure of space-
  time or (c) turning your skull inside out. From the look 
  of those carved panels, it seems to be a transcription 
  of the thoughts or speeches of the seven kings after 
  they died. Most alarming of all, the bottom lines of 
  each panel are freshly carved. Someone updated these 
  carvings within the last few hours – someone for 
  whom the Language of Leng is clearly a native tongue. 
  • 
  Below the eighth panel is what looks initially like a 
  mantra or a chant, but any character with Computer 
  Use who makes a successful Idea roll has the 
  disturbing intuition that it’s really a transcript of a 
  failed handshaking session. Say you’re trying to open 
  a connection to another computer – there’s a whole 
  protocol to be followed where you send a signal, it 
  responds, and then you send a response to the response. 
  If the other party fails to respond, you don’t know if 
  they didn’t get it because they’re not listening, or because 
  the network dropped the packet. This transcript looks 
  like someone’s trying to open up a network connection, 
  but the packets keep dropping, so they retry every few 
  centuries. There are fresh carvings at the bottom of 
  this panel too – it looks like the network’s back up...
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  118
  The Shepherd
  As the characters explore the monastery, they hear terrified 
  whimpering coming from one side room. Exploring, they 
  discover a young Tibetan man huddled in a corner. He’s 
  clearly human, not possessed, and absolutely terrified. Once 
  the characters calm him down, they can talk to him (if 
  none of the characters speak Lhasa, then Shamar knows 
  a few words in Chinese or English and can make himself 
  understood).
   
  Shamar is a young Tibetan shepherd. He explains that he 
  was out looking for an escaped goat near “the haunted 
  ruins” when he found himself in this strange valley. He 
  couldn’t find his way home, and wandered here for some 
  time before people started shooting at him. Terrified, he ran 
  into this building and doesn’t know where he is. He fears 
  that he’s dead and in hell.
  Long ago, in his great-grandfather’s time, the priests of the 
  Black Buddha worked magic in the mountains, and many 
  goats were sacrificed to the blue fires. Then, before Shamar 
  was born, government men from far-off Beijing came to 
  the village and took the priests away. Shamar never saw it 
  himself, not until today, but the old men sometimes spoke 
  guardedly of secret passes that led to other worlds, and 
  terrible monsters that dwelt in the heights. 
  Shamar can translate some of the inscriptions on the walls, 
  and knows the tales of the ancient kings and how Drigum 
  Tsenpo was slain with his own sword. The tale is often told 
  in Shamar’s village. 
  The Haunted Ruins: If asked about the Haunted Ruins, 
  Shamar explains that there is an old tomb on the hillside 
  near his village. Legend says that the body of a king was 
  secretly buried there, long long ago. 
  7. Into the Catacombs
  Exploring further, the characters find a copper-clad 
  trapdoor that leads down into a catacomb beneath the 
  monastery. Small niches, each containing a human skeleton, 
  line the walls. The skeletons all show signs of violent death 
  and dismemberment; notably, every one of them has had 
  its skull cracked open. The catacombs lead to the tombs of 
  the seven Tsenpo kings – there’s a warren of narrow, twisty 
  corridors between each tomb.
  Cult Operations
  Before the player characters got here, the Chosen started 
  awakening the dead kings. Two cultists (Aldar Jacob 
  and another sorcerer) are already atop the monastery, 
  performing the spell that will draw the two worlds into 
  alignment. The remaining seven (twelve, minus the two 
  up top, the two snipers, and Mr. Zombie) are busy in 
  the catacombs, digging up the dead kings. The faster the 
  characters moved through the earlier parts of the scenario, 
  the higher the ratio of living cultists to undead alien hybrid 
  monstrosities. 
  Exploring the Catacombs
  The first two tombs that the characters find are all identical: 
  each one is a square room shaped like a truncated pyramid, 
  so the walls slope inwards sharply. Whoever built this place 
  thought that ‘squids and skulls’ was a motif worth using on 
  every available surface.
   
  Back to the Mountains 
  If the characters bring Shamar back out of the monastery, then they can retrace his steps down 
  the valley. As the cultists bring more of the dmu thag online, then the link between this 
  world and ours grows stronger. A short walk down the valley brings the characters out onto a 
  mountain slope somewhere in the Himilayas. Looking south, they can see the beautiful vista of 
  the Roof of the World in the morning sun, but looking behind them, they see the alien skies 
  and the looming shape of the Dead Plateau. The two worlds are coming into alignment!
  The Tomb of Drigum Tsenpo
  With his dmu thag severed, Drigum Tsenpo could not establish a connection with the world of 
  the dead plateau. His all-too-mortal body is buried in the ruins near Shamar’s village. The 
  characters have all the ingredients needed to reactivate Drigum in the same way the Chosen 
  woke the other dead kings – but since Drigum doesn’t have a functional dmu thag, it’s like 
  short circuting the whole system. 
  Resurrecting the eighth king disrupts the ritual.
   
  Of course, taking that approach means the characters end up stuck in the wilderness of the 
  Himalayas with an angry dead king...
  
  119
  There’s a cylindrical copper coffin in a stone-lined well in 
  the floor at the centre of each room. Judging by the size 
  of the coffin, whatever was buried in there must have been 
  bigger than a human.
   
  In the first two tombs, the Golden Promise cut open the 
  top of the coffin with a blowtorch and then wired one of 
  their own cultists into a summoning grid. A pale corpse of 
  a cultist lies next to each tomb; they drained their own life 
  force into whatever was in the coffin. The coffins are now 
  empty apart from piles of ancient human bone fragments.
   
  What’s in the other five tombs depends on how long it took 
  the characters to get here. For every time the characters 
  got hit by the life-draining effect of the Dead Pyramid, the 
  cultists had time to open another coffin. So, the characters 
  might run into the cultists in the fourth chamber if they 
  only got hit twice, or get to the empty eighth chamber and 
  find that all the coffins are already open if they got hit five 
  or more times.
  Empty Tombs
  Examining the walls reveals one panel that depicts how 
  the kings were buried. The carving shows a king – clearly 
  not human, more like a stretched BLUE HADES – being 
  lowered into its coffin by human servants. Each of the kings 
  carried a pair of sacrificial knives, and was accompanied 
  into the grave by three human sacrifices.
  Meeting the Cultists
  If the characters catch up with the cultists, then they come 
  across up to four Golden Promise Chosen in one of the 
  tombs. One cultist stays on guard with a submachine gun, 
  while another works on cutting the coffin lid open with a 
  blowtorch. The third cultist has a laptop and other electronics 
  to set up a summoning grid, and the fourth cultist is the 
  designated sacrifice. If there are fewer than six cultists 
  remaining (including the two up top), then they’ve got to 
  multitask (so, the last poor cultist has to wire himself into the 
  summoning grid) after cutting open the coffin, poor bastard.
  If attacked by the characters, the cultists try to awaken 
  the dead king immediately. Doing so requires a successful 
  Computer Use (Magic) roll against the cultist’s skill of 
  45%. If the cultists get killed before they wake the king, the 
  characters can take advantage of the open coffin to grab the 
  sacrifice knives. Otherwise, they need to deal with an angry 
  dead Tibetan god-king in a cramped space... (see page 48 for 
  the statistics for angry undead Tibetan god-kings).
  Unlooted Tombs 
  Any tomb that the Chosen haven’t yet opened is a bonus. 
  The characters can, if they want, bash the coffin open 
  with an entrenching tool and grab the knives within. Yes, 
  Soul Knives of the Tibetan Kings
  Each of the seven kings was buried with a pair of knives. As the characters should have worked 
  out from Tenzil Gyotso’s account of Tibetan mythology, the weapons of the Tsenpo kings can 
  sever a dmu thag cord, as happened to the unfortunate Drigum Tsenpo. The ‘knives’ are more like 
  swords; the blades are nearly a metre long, and made from a heavy alloy incorporating elements 
  that don’t occur on Earth (or show up on the periodic table, for that matter). The blades use 
  the Melee (Sword) skill and inflict 1d8+1 damage on a successful hit. They can also injure 
  immaterial creatures like ghosts. Using such a weapon costs 1d4 SAN per attack; if you’re 
  driven mad by the sword, then you start believing that you’re one of the Tibetan god-kings and 
  that everyone around you is a sacrificial victim.
  Most importantly, the blades can be used to counter the ritual – see Riding the Dmu Thag, below.
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  120
  they’re going to save the world by killing monsters and 
  taking their stuff. If there aren’t any unlooted tombs, then 
  the characters have to be more creative when it comes to 
  getting the swords...
  The Stairs
  Finally, the maze of catacombs doubles back on itself and 
  ends in a narrow spiral staircase, leading up through the 
  centre of the monastery. From above, the characters hear 
  an unearthly noise, a buzzing drone that bypasses their ears 
  and seems to vibrate their skulls directly. 
  Half-way up the stairs, the characters pass another copper-
  lined door, like the trapdoor they passed through earlier. 
  This door is sealed and has clearly not been opened by the 
  Chosen. Judging by its position, it must lead into the upper 
  levels of the monastery.
  8. Riding the Dmu Thag
  The staircase leads the characters out onto the partially 
  ruined roof of the cylindrical tower atop the monastery. 
  It’s a target rich environment: in the middle of the roof 
  are Aldar Jacobs and the other Chosen (a woman named 
  Louisa Perrin), plus any surviving cultists if the characters 
  stopped some of the dead kings from waking. Surrounding 
  them, sitting crosslegged on thrones like monstrous judges, 
  are the dead kings. Three metres all, grey-skinned, frog-like 
  eyes, long sharp claws, and each of them with an expression 
  of blissful tranquillity on their blood-splattered faces. A 
  silvery cord, barely visible to the naked eye, rises lazily from 
  each king’s forehead and climbs into the sky. 
  Aldar and Perrin sit in the middle of a magic circle with 
  a copy of The Apocalypse Codex, a laptop, and – being 
  Americans – lots of guns. Praise the Sleeping Christ and 
  pass the ammunition!
  Thwarting the Ritual 
  Thwarting with extreme prejudice, of course. There are 
  several ways to do it.
  •	
  Cutting The Dmu Thag: This is the most likely 
  option. The characters can recreate the deeds of 
  Lognam and cut the silver cord using the sacrificial 
  knives. If they looted the tombs, then they already 
  have knives. If they don’t, then they’ll need to steal or 
  otherwise obtain the knifes from the animated kings. 
  To cut a silver cord, the characters need to make 
  called shots (-20% penalty to their attack rolls) when 
  attacking the dead kings. Any amount of damage 
  will sever the cord. Cutting the cord makes the king 
  mortal, but doesn’t otherwise impede it.
  •	
  Killing the dead kings: They can’t be killed by 
  physical damage alone – their dmu thag cords have 
  to be severed to deny them their connection to the 
  spiritual realm. However, they can be crippled by 
  enough damage, and then the characters can use the 
  knives to slice the cords.
  •	
  Killing the Chosen: Aldar and Perrin are protected 
  by a warding circle that’s both a Level 4 Area Ward 
  and a Level 4 Defensive Binding that’s plugged into 
  the magic of the monastery – the binding regenerates 
  back up to its full protection after each round. So, the 
  characters need to do twenty points of damage before 
  they can even try shooting the Chosen. 
  •	
  Breaking the Circle: The circle’s there to protect the 
  Chosen from the hungers of the dead kings. Removing 
  the circle (with a well-placed exorcism, or by physically 
  breaking the lines) means the dead kings might decide 
  to eat the Chosen instead. 
  •	
  Resurrecting Drigum Tsenpo: As described above, 
  the characters can get back to Earth as the link between 
  our world and that of the Sleeper grows. If they 
  activate the broken dmu thag of Drigum Tsenpo, it’ll 
  disrupt the connection.
  •	
  Talking the Cultists Down: Louisa Perrin was raised 
  in the faith and is a true believer in the Golden Promise, 
  but Aldar Jacobs came to the Sleeping Christ late in life. 
  The characters could appeal to his sanity by getting him 
  to look at the undead horrors surrounding him. At the 
  very least, they could slow him down while they start 
  sawing at silver cords.
  The Face Beneath The Silk
  Tibetan legend claims that Nyatri Tsenpo’s father was a 
  beast called a Theurang, a horror with a flapping tongue 
  that covered its face.
  Lovecraft wrote of a “High-Priest Not To Be Described, which 
  wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in 
  a prehistoric stone monastery” upon the Plateau of Leng. In a 
  dream, he encountered this horror: 
  At the farther end was a high stone dais reached by five steps; and 
  there on a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk 
  figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To 
  this being the [guide] made certain signs with his hands, and the 
  lurker in the dark replied by raising a disgustingly carven flute of  
  ivory in silk-covered paws and blowing certain loathsome sounds 
  from beneath its flowing yellow mask. 
  –The Dream-Quest of  Unknown Kadath
  
  121
  The thing that dwells behind that second copper door, 
  the father of Nyatri Tsenpo, the High Priest Not To Be 
  Described... and the player characters probably just killed its 
  children to the seventh generation. No wonder it’s pissed. 
  From the monastery below, the player character hear an 
  unearthly, ungodly keening, a ghastly wail carried on the thin 
  winds. As the portal back to Earth closes, the wail echoes 
  out across the Roof of the World, and half the population 
  of the world hear it in the distance. Up close, it’s worth 
  1d4/2d8 SAN loss.
  Then, from below, the characters hear the sound of 
  something shuffling towards that second copper door on 
  the spiral staircase. Unreasoning terror grips all of them – 
  they know something terrible is coming.
   
  What do they do?
  •	
  Run Away: Very, very sensible. The last character 
  down the stairs (determined by DEX rank if nothing 
  else) sees the copper door opening behind him. If he 
  looks back, it’s 1d10/1d100 SAN loss. The surviving 
  characters find themselves outside the monastery 
  – from there, they can either Gate home or else slip 
  through the closing portal into Tibet.
  •	
  Barricade the Door: Holding the door shut against 
  the High Priest Not To Be Described means matching 
  STR against its strength of 15 on the Resistance Table. 
  Three successes keep the door shut long enough for 
  the rest of the team to escape, or for a boffin to open 
  a Gate home. Each failure means the character holding 
  the door glimpses part of what’s on the far side, for 
  1d6/1d20 SAN loss.
  •	
  Climb Down The Outside: The fastest way off the 
  monastery is to rappel down the sides. This sheer 
  surface calls for a Difficult Climb check. Failure means 
  the character has a choice – either he falls, taking 2d6 
  damage, or climbs down slowly and so sees the High 
  Priest as it looks over the parapet (1d6/1d20 SAN loss).
  •	
  Gate Out: Opening a Gate back to Earth would 
  normally take thirty minutes, but right now the 
  plateau is dimensional swiss cheese. A level three 
  Gate (requiring only two minutes, and a successful 
  Computer Use (Magic) roll) is enough to punch a 
  hole back to England. 
  •	
  Fight the High Priest: Well, there’s a reason we 
  encouraged the players to make temporary player 
  characters.
  Aftermath
  If the characters escaped via a Gate, then they tumble 
  through a portal into a field near Somerset. A Laundry 
  helicopter retrieves them within an hour. However, if they 
  escaped into Tibet, then they’ll need to find a way to call 
  home and then hide until they can be retrieved, or until the 
  British government can arrange their return home. The 
  Chinese – and especially the Nameless Bureau – will want 
  to know what half-a-dozen British soldiers were doing on 
  the Roof of the World. 
  Back in England, the surviving characters are exorcised and 
  debriefed. Keyhole satellites glimpsed the Dead Plateau as it 
  came into alignment with Earth, but full congruency lasted 
  only a few seconds. If the Sleeper sensed the proximity of 
  more than seven billion minds, it didn’t react. 
  No apocalypse today. Wait for tomorrow.
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  122
  Handout #1 - Church Meeting Flyer
  I am come that they might have life, 
  and that they might have it more 
  abundantly   
  – John 10.10
  Are you among the Saved? 
  The LORD will know his own!
  Prosperity on Earth and a reward 
  in Heaven shall be apportioned 
  to those who accept the LORD. 
  He shall bring comfort to those 
  in need, and hope to those who 
  despair. Turn to Him and be 
  Saved!
  Come and see! If you need help, 
  if you feel lost, if you need hope 
  and faith, then come to us! 
  Come to the GOLDEN PROMISE 
  MINISTRY open prayer event at 
  the O2 Arena!
  It will change your life!
  
  123
  Handout #2 - Tenzil Gyatso Letters
  ThE MORAL hIGh GROUND
  ThIS DOCuMeNT IS ClaSSIFIeD 
  I V O R Y  T R u M P e T  C l e a R a N C e 
  IF YOu DO NOT POSSeSS IVORY TRuMPeT CleaRaNCe, DO NOT ReaD ThIS DOCuMeNT.
  Tenzil Gyatso
  C/O International Council for Tibet
  17th June 2006
  Dear Sir,
  I was given the name of your office by a friend in the British Museum. I understand that you 
  provide funding and resources to foreign academics resident in the United Kingdom who are not 
  attached to any university or other institution, and I certainly fall into that category, as I 
  was forced to leave my homeland under duress. My field of expertise is the early history of Tibet 
  and Buddhism. I can make myself available for interview at your convenience.
  Yours sincerely,
  Tenzil Gyatso
  Tenzil Gyatso
  C/O International Council for Tibet
  5th October 2008
  Dear Sir,
  In your most recent letter, you asked for a fuller description of Nyatri Tsenpo, Drigum 
  Tsenpo, and the dmu thag. Nyatri Tsenpo was the first king of Tibet. According to legend, 
  he was the son of a magical creature called a theurang, and possessed prodigious magical 
  powers. Notably, he was connected to Heaven by a silver cord that extended from his forehead 
  into the sky. Nyatri Tsenpo could ascend by means of this cord to the heavens to obtain 
  divine wisdom. The cord also held Tsenpo’s immortality.
  When his son came of age, Nyatri Tsenpo ascended again into heaven, and did not return. His 
  son ruled Tibet for many years, until his son came of age in turn, and in turn the second 
  king (Mutri Tsenpo) ascended to join his father. This cycle continued for seven generations, 
  until the time of the eighth king, Drigum Tsenpo.
  Drigum Tsenpo quarreled with one of his servants, a groom named Lognam. In their fight, 
  Lognam severed the silver cord of the king, ending Drigum Tsenpo’s immortality and killing 
  the king. The descendants of Drigum Tsenpo also became mortal, and the era of magical kings 
  was ended. 
  The dmu thag refers to the silver cord that sprouted from the forehead of each king and 
  connected them to heaven. 
  I hope this satisfies your curiosity. 
  I also note that you have yet to reply to my letters of the 15th of March, or the 8th of June, 
  or the 12th of August. If you do not intend to provide funding for my work, I wish that you 
  would say so instead of leaving me in suspense. I was forced to leave my homeland with very 
  little, and am forced to devote the bulk of my time and energy – which should be devoted to 
  my work – on arguing with bureaucrats and immigration officials. Should I add your office 
  to the list of British officials who have give me nothing but empty promises?
  I await your swift response!
  Yours,
  Tenzil Gyatso
  The Moral High Ground
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  124
  A
  Accounts & Rumours 
  96
  Adaptation 
  83
  Administration Building 
  91
  After the Great War 
  78
  Aftermath 
  89, 103, 121
  Afterword 
  38
  Agent Bindings 
  66
  Alert 
  101
  Amhurst Viewing Centre 
  70
  ANNING BLUE SKULL 
  34
  Apocalypse 
  102
  Arcana 
  59
  Arcana Assignments 
  59
  Assembly Hall 
  91
  Assets Assignments 
  57
  Assets Division 
  57
  (Handling) Assets 
  6
  (Matching) Assets 
  7
  (Inhuman) Assets 
  60
  (Rogue) Assets 
  8
  B
  Back Doors 
  67
  Back to the Mountains 
  118
  Background Reading 
  89
  Banishing 
  23
  (The) Baron’s Mark 
  32
  BASHFUL INCENDIARY 
  17
  Basilisk Guns 
  85
  Basilisk Shades 
  72
  (Pastor Malcolm) Beal 
  93
  Beating the Eye 
  54
  Before the Laundry 
  77
  Big Red Button 
  40, 44
  Black Bag Job 
  96
  (History of the) Black Chamber 
  49
  (Playing a) Black Chamber Character 
  53
  (The) Black Chamber 
  49
  (The Original) Black Chamber 
  49
  (Working for the) Black Chamber 
  60
  (The) Black Pit 
  97
  Bleed Through 
  26
  BLOODY BARON 
  34
  BLUE HADES 
  35, 62
  Bound Demons 
  64
  (The) Break-In 
  109
  Breaking Your Oath of Office 
  66
  Budgeting 
  7
  Bullets of Soul Eating 
  74
  (The) Bus Crash 
  90
  C
  (Legal Counsel Henrietta) Cable 
  93
  Cafeteria 
  91
  (The) Call 
  87
  Call the Cops! 
  87
  (Agent) CANDID 
  15
  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN 
  82
  (Word and Deed –) Casting Spells 
  27
  (Exploring the) Catacombs 
  118
  (Playing) Chamber Officers 
  76
  (Playing Within The) Chamber 
  76
  (The) Chamber & Others 
  61
  (The) Chamber as Antagonists 
  76
  Chamber Assets 
  69
  Chamber Games 
  75
  (The) Chamber of the Sleeper 
  97
  Chamber Officers 
  60
  (The) Chase 
  111
  (The) Chosen 
  106, 107
  Church 
  91
  Cleaning Up 
  111
  CODICIL BLACK SKULL 
  29
  Collapse of Existing Support Mechanisms 83
  Common Gadgets 
  71
  Computational Demonology 
  22, 25
  (Uses of) Computational Demonology 
  26
  Connecticut 
  55
  Consultation 
  8
  Contacting the School 
  95
  (Historic) Contacts 
  35
  (Pre-human) Contacts 
  34
  (Prehistoric) Contacts 
  35
  Control 
  54
  Control Link 
  63
  Controlled by Control 
  56
  Controllers 
  12
  (Principal Nigel) Cragge 
  93
  Creating Characters 
  78
  (Aleister) Crowley 
  80
  (Increased) Cult Activity 
  84
  Cult Operations 
  118
  (Meeting the) Cultists 
  119
  Cymothea Exilis 
  45
  Cymothean Parasite, Tongue-Eaters 
  47
  D
  (Claude) Dansey 
  80
  DANUBE CROSSING 
  35
  Dark Commissioners 
  54
  (The) Dark Mark & Other Bindings 
  63
  (The) Dark Tower 
  69
  (Examining) David 
  90
  (Talking to) David 
  89
  Dead Emperor of Tibet, Neck-Throned Kings 48
  Dead Kings 
  48
  Death Eater 
  67
  Death in the Chamber 
  69
  Defences & Requirements 
  43
  Defensive Binding 
  23, 79
  Delaware 
  55
  (Living With Your) Demon 
  65
  Destiny Entanglement 
  79
  Director 
  53
  (The) Dmu Thag 
  116
  (The) Dmu Thag of Nyatri Tsenpo 
  106
  (The) Door 
  32
  Doppleganger 
  65
  Dormitories 
  91
  Dream Visions 
  83
  (The Tomb of) Drigum Tsenpo 
  118
  (Creating a) Drone 
  68
  Drone Flights 
  38
  (Playing a) Drone Operator 
  68
  Drop Zone 
  114
  E
  Eater of Tongues 
  45
  (The) Echoing, Empty Chamber 
  61
  Empty Tombs 
  119
  Encounters & Events 
  115
  Endgames 
  39
  Entropy Manipulation 
  23, 79
  Equipment Upgrades 
  85
  Index
  
  125
  INDEx
  (The) Erratic 
  32
  Escape 
  101
  (The) European Agencies 
  62
  Exorcism 
  24, 79
  External Agents 
  6
  External Assets 
  4
  External Assets & Equipment 
  11
  (Categories of) External Asset 
  6
  (Creating) External Assets 
  10
  (Monitoring) External Assets 
  5
  (Playing an) External Assets Campaign 
  10
  (Status of) External Assets 
  5
  (What) External Assets Do 
  8
  (Why) External Assets? 
  4
  External Missions 
  12
  F
  (The) Face Beneath The Silk 
  120
  Fear Engines 
  72
  Feint & Counterfeint 
  44
  Fertile Tongue-Eater 
  47
  FLAMEGATE Variable-Geometry  Ranged 
  Pentacle 
  73
  (Ian) Fleming 
  80
  (J.F.C. “Boney”) Fuller 
  80
  G
  Gadgets 
  71
  (Vice Principal Adam) Gantz 
  93, 94
  Gate 
  79
  Gate Shunt 
  28
  Geas 
  79
  Georgia 
  55
  Getting Down To The Valley 
  115
  Glamour 
  24, 79
  Gorgonism Trigger 
  71
  Grimoires and Practical Magic 
  79
  (Playing) Gyatso 
  108
  (Securing) Gyatso 
  110
  Gyatso’s Flat 
  109
  Gyatso’s Work 
  109
  H
  Handout #1 - Church Meeting Flyer 
  122
  Handout #1 - Newspaper Article 
  103
  Handout #2 - Laundry incident report 
  104
  Handout #2 - Tenzil Gyatso Letters 
  123
  Handout #3 - Telephone call 
  105
  (The) Hands of Christ 
  107
  (The) Haunted Monastery 
  117
  (The) Hellhound 
  92
  Hostiles 
  13
  House of Horrors 
  87
  Howard, Robert 
  14
  Human Hosts 
  64
  Humanities Block 
  91
  I
  ICEQUEEN Virus 
  73
  Illegal Missions 
  8
  Increased Security 
  82
  (The) Intelligence Community 
  61
  K
  (Interrogating) Karla 
  100
  (Investigating) Karla 
  99
  (Playing) Karla 
  100
  L
  (The) Laundry 
  62
  (The) Laundry & The Phoney War 
  84
  Laundry Expeditions 
  35
  Liaison 
  7
  (Creating a) Liaison Officer 
  12
  Licence to Thwart 
  9
  Location 
  12
  Lockhart, Gideon 
  16
  M
  Madness 
  83
  Madness Threshold 
  10
  Magic ‘Stunts’ 
  27
  (Different Types of) Magic 
  22
  (Enhanced) Magic 
  84
  (Mental) Magic 
  22
  (Sympathetic) Magic 
  79
  (Traditional) Magic 
  22, 26
  (Uses of Traditional) Magic 
  27
  (What) Magic Isn’t 
  20
  (Working) Magic 
  2
  Magical Items 
  79
  Manned Flights 
  37
  (Chemistry Teacher Jill) Marsham 
  93
  Massachusetts 
  54
  Maryland 
  55
  Mindseal Talisman 
  74
  (The) Missing Mrs. Watson 
  109
  (Planning the) Mission 
  112
  (The) Mission 
  12
  Mission Briefing 
  108
  (Deniable) Missions 
  9
  (Problematic) Missions 
  9
  Monitoring Assignments 
  57
  Monitoring Division 
  57
  Monsters 
  45
  Montauk 
  70
  (The) Moral high Ground 
  106
   1. A Distant Trumpet 
  108
   2. The Saved and the Lost 
  110
   3. Flyover Country 
  111
   4. Through the Gate 
  113
   5. Across the Dead Plateau 
  114
   6. The Lamaserie 
  117
   7. Into the Catacombs 
  118
   8. Riding the Dmu Thag 
  120
  N
  (The) Nameless Bureau 
  62
  (Rise of the) Nazgûl 
  51
  Necrominipad 
  85
  Necronomiphone S 
  85
  New Hampshire 
  54
  New Jersey 
  55
  New York 
  55
  Night Hag 
  65
  Non-Humans 
  6
  North Carolina 
  55
  O
  OFCUT 
  24
  Official Channels 
  95
  Official Paralysis & Corruption 
  82
  Old Ones Awake 
  84
  (The) Operational Phenomenology Agency 53
  Operations 
  57
  Operations Assignments 
  58
  (The) Other Place 
  20
  Overview 
  29
  P
  Panin, Nikolai 
  19
  Pennsylvania 
  55
  Persephone Hazard 
  17
  Personalities of the Interbellum 
  80
  (David) Philpott 
  88
  (Timothy) Philpott 
  98
  
  GOD GAME BLACK
  126
  (The) Phoney War 
  82
  (Operations on the) Plateau 
  31
  (Survival on the) Plateau 
  39
  (The) Plateau 
  29
  (The) Plateau & Other Places 
  41
  (The) Plateau of the Sleeper 
  29, 39
  Post-mission Analysis 
  38
  (The) Post-War Years 
  50
  Pre-K-Syndrome and Psychic Contacts: 
  83
  Pre-written apps 
  22
  Preamble 
  29
  Pressing the Big Red Button 
  44
  Previous Expeditions and Contacts 
  34
  Prognostication 
  79
  Prince, Johnny 
  18
  Providence Campus 
  70
  Psychic Pressure 
  83
  Purchasing Items 
  11
  (The) Pyramid 
  31
  R
  (The) Ranch 
  69
  (The) Recent Carvings 
  117
  Recruiting an Agent 
  95
  Remote Control 
  68
  Remote Operations 
  67
  Remote Possession 
  68
  Requisitions, Training & Bureaucracy 
  79
  Research 
  59
  Research Assignments 
  60
  Resisting Possession 
  68
  Rest of the World 
  62
  Rhode Island 
  55
  Ring of Power 
  73
  (Thwarting the) Ritual 
  120
  (The) Room 
  70
  (The) Rosetta Stone 
  31
  Running an Agent Scene 
  96
  (The) Russian Connection 
  86
  S
  Sanitise 
  101
  (The) Schoolmaster 
  80
  Science Block 
  91
  Scrying 
  24, 79
  Security Systems 
  91
  Seeding the Threat 
  43
  Shades of Night 
  72
  (The) Shepherd 
  118
  Shunt/Ward Combo 
  28
  Shunt Talisman 
  28
  (The) Shutdown Code 
  99
  Sideways Promotions 
  6
  Soul Knives of the Tibetan Kings 
  119
  South Carolina 
  55
  Special Powers 
  10
  Spell Macros 
  22
  (Casting a) Spell 
  22
  Spontaneous Possessions 
  84
  Squadron 666 
  37
  (The) Staff 
  93
  (The) Stairs 
  120
  Stalker 
  67
  Standard Missions 
  8
  Starting Gear 
  11
  Status 
  10
  (The) Strange Case of PLUTO KOBOLD 52
  (The) Students 
  93
  Succubus 
  65
  Summoning and Banishing 
  79
  Support 
  38, 59
  Support Assignments 
  59
  Surveillance 
  95
  (The) Swords of Christ 
  107
  T
  Taken by the Cleaner 
  110
  Talents 
  6
  Teaching Methods 
  92
  (Operations within the) Temple 
  34
  (The) Temple of the Sleeper 
  33
  (The) Thing On The Plane, Elephantine Mount 114
  Think of the Children 
  86
   1. The Break-In 
  87
   2. Mission Briefing 
  89
   3. Jesus was in Griffindor 
  91
   4. Covert Ops 
  95
   5. Zoë 
  97
   6. Cult Responses 
  100
  (The) Third Academy 
  86
  (The) Thirteenth Directorate 
  62
  Thralls 
  61
  (Playing) Thralls 
  76
  Threat Response 
  38
  Threats & Dangers 
  81
  Timing 
  86
  Tomb Builders 
  34
  Tongue-Eater Victims 
  47
  (The) Tongues of Christ 
  107
  Tools 
  25
  Tough Zombies 
  47
  (The) Twist 
  13
  U
  Ubbo-Sathla Tissue 
  71
  UKUSA Pact 
  62
  Uncanny Events 
  82
  (Playing) Undercover Agents 
  76
  Undercover Officer 
  96
  Unlooted Tombs 
  119
  Updated Personnel 
  14
  V
  (Truancy Officer Robert) Vake 
  93, 94
  Vake’s Men 
  95
  Virginia 
  55
  W
  Waite-Dirac Possession Apparatus 
  74
  (Navigating the) Wall of Pain 
  33
  (The) Wall of Pain 
  32
  Ward, Area 
  24
  Ward, Offensive 
  24
  Ward, Personal 
  25
  Warding 
  63
  Wards 
  79, 85
  (The) Washlamb Academy 
  90
  (The) Watchtower 
  32
  Weird Weather 
  82
  Welcoming Committee 
  116
  (Denis) Wheatley 
  80
  Wild Cards 
  6
  (The) Wizards of Mahogany Row 
  81
  Word and Deed – Casting Spells 
  27
  (A) Word from the Directorate 
  100
  World War II 
  50
  Y
  You’re Off The Case 
  89
  Z
  (Activating) Zoë 
  99
  (Playing) Zoë 
  99
  Zoë & The School 
  99
  Zoë’s Watcher 
  99
  Zombox 
  75
  
  B
  ehind the modern façade of Britain in the 1920s is a country teeming with links to the supernatural. British 
  folklore harkens back to days of old when early cultures lived alongside strange folk and stranger creatures, 
  when druids and shamans made sacrifices to pantheons of gods both powerful and terrible, and when people 
  celebrated myth and legend in song, art, and oral tradition at the very heart of their civilizations. And those deep 
  roots that so colourfully tell of fantastical creatures, miraculous events, and wondrous deeds also hint and grasp 
  blindly at darker truths. The truth is that folklore can take us behind the veil of reality to glimpse the terrible, 
  alien truths of the universe beyond, capturing vague notions of evil, malevolent beings, their horrible deeds, and 
  the primal fears that they inspire and that have been preserved in Britain’s cultural memory.
  Cthulhu Britanica: Folklore presents a uniquely British 
  vision of Lovecraftian horror where fairies, witches, and 
  folk traditions intertwine with the dreadful, eldritch 
  powers and otherworldly terrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. 
  The book features:
  •	
  A folklore bestiary, including fairy folk, shape-
  shifters, giants, little folk, black dogs, dragons, 
  water horses, bodily horrors, and much more
  •	
  A folklore calendar and a new 1920s profession—
  the folklorist—for players
  •	
  Detailed sections on using folklore and folk magic 
  for Call of Cthulhu Keepers
  •	
  And nine Folklore Mythos threats that can 
  introduced into any scenario or campaign, or 
  used as single-session scenarios 
  SKU: CB7351
  ISBN: 978-1-907204-16-6  
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/The Laundry/CB71207 God Game Black.pdf