Berlin Wicked City Remix 4: Scenario 3

 

We are now going to talk about the last scenario of Berlin: Wicked City. It is called "Shreckfilm."

The plot goes something like this: Countess Agnes Esterhazy is a famous film actress who leads a nasty witch coven that operates from a brothel. A journalist, Lina Desmond, infiltrates the coven and steals documents. She knows the coven is helping Baron Grunau with some evil scheme but she does not know exactly what. One of the documents she got is a photo with the investigators. Another one is a snippet of film, showing Esterhazy walking around a film set. 

She doesn’t know, but this film is extremely important to the cult, as it serves as a soul vessel for Esterhazy. While the film exists, she is invulnerable. If the film is destroyed, she is destroyed. 

Lina, chased by the coven, decides to give the envelope with all the documents to the investigators and runs away without explaining anything. Once the investigators receive it, they start being hunted by the coven. By investigating the clues in the envelope, the investigators may discover the brothel where the witch coven hides, their plan to film a movie called Das Necronomicon with Grunau in one of the city parks, and the Palace of the Occult, where a pro-Nazi mystic shows off his “powers”. This should eventually come to a head at the filming of Das Necronomicon, where it is revealed that Esterhazy tricked Grunau all along, and the ritual will not invoke Yog-Sothoth as he expects, but instead carry the souls of anybody filmed by the magical cameras to an alternate dimension where they become slaves of Esterhazy. If the investigators go there, they will eventually get a chance to fight Esterhazy, and release all the souls she trapped if they win. 

The powers of Esterhazy: in the scenario as written, she made herself almost immortal by using celluloid film magic, which essentially works a lot like other magic where the sorcerer uses an image of themselves as a soul vessel. While the vessel exists, the sorcerer cannot be harmed in any way. This reminds me of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s story, but it goes back to Ancient Egyptian magic (this should be discoverable by the investigators, but is not mentioned at all in the scenario as wrottem). In the case of Esterhazy, the vessel is a slice of film portraying her, and the spell had the side effect of making her look like a movie projection (in black and white).

This scenario can work with a more freeform structure (“sandbox”) than the two previous ones, with the investigators trying to avoid attacks from the cult (SAs, gangsters and policemen by day, witches and cat things by night), while investigating the clues. Nothing can really “go wrong”: even if they manage to kill Esterhazy prematurely, they still have to deal with the rest of the coven and with Grunau. 

As mentioned before, the scenario starts with a journalist giving a manila envelope to the investigators and immediately running away. The envelope contains several clues inside it, but two are essential: a cut of celluloid film with a scene showing Countess Esterhazy moving around a movie set (the soul vessel) and a photo that shows the investigators posing at an indoor location they don’t recognize, with people they don’t know, and Inspector Krieg (remember him?), who is in all fours on a leash (this is normally the element of the picture that worries players the most). None of the investigators remembers posing for this picture.

From here, the investigators start getting into trouble. When they come out of the restaurant where they met the journalist, they are in the middle of a  fog, followed by scary feline howls, and thrown into a street battle between Nazi SAs and anarchists. If they escape this, they get lost from each other, and one is attacked by a cat-thing (like a rat-thing, but with a cat instead of a rat). To this, I added a coven witch following another investigator home and either trying to use a spell to cause a heart attack to the investigator or to a neighbour of the investigator who showed up at the wrong time . 

I think these first scenes are important in setting the tone: the first attack of the coven must be violent, brutal, and mysterious. This will make the investigators believe that whoever is after them a) is ruthless and  b) has access to dangerous supernatural powers.

In the scenario as written, the coven continues using their pawns on the police and the Nazi party to come after the investigators and force them to give up the envelope. To me, however, this is illogical. How are they so sure the investigators want to keep the envelope? The investigators don’t really know the journalist that gave them the envelope, and they have no idea what is going on. Why wouldn't the coven try to solve this the easy way?

So here I make the first large change to the scenario as written. The day after the night chase, a lawyer presents himself to (one of) the investigators with an offer of a substantial amount of money for the return of the envelope and its contents. Being a mediator, the lawyer does not reveal who his customer is, and does not know himself what is in the envelope. The secret customer is Esterhazy and her coven, who want the film back. Esterhazy is extremely vulnerable because if someone burns that fail, she is destroyed. Of course, they ask for all the contents of the manila envelope because they don’t want the investigators to know which object is of value to them. Also, on the first night, they thought the investigators were allies of the reporter. Now they think the investigators are just some random people, and they are confident a mix of intimidation and a substantial offer of money will convince them to give back the envelope.

I ran this scenario four times, and in three out of four, the players actually accepted to sell the envelope (two of the groups after being roughed up either by SA bullies or by policemen under Krieg). This didn't stop them, however, from continuing the  investigation, but it did make the coven a lot less interested in them.

Here, I need to point out one of the main weaknesses of the scenario. Like in the previous one, it  is the “quest giver” NPC, in this case, Lina Desmond, the reporter who left the manila envelope with the investigators. She shows up later to do a long round of exposition, spoon-feeding the investigators a (confused) info dump. I decided to remove her from the rest of the scenario (she instead shows up dead in the river). She offers no essential clue that cannot be found by the investigators otherwise, and her appearance will lead to lots of unconvincing “I don’t remember” or “I don’t understand” answers, as required either to leave a mystery for the investigators to solve, or because that part of the plot was really not worked out by the author. Why did she collect those specific documents in the manila envelope? (she doesn’t remember). Why did she decide to give the documents to (some of) the people in that photo, and why specifically them, and not other person in the photo? (she doesn’t know)

Not having her appear will avoid considerable effort from the Keeper to give consistent answers to questions the scenario leaves largely unanswered. Notice there is one particularly incomprehensible option that the scenario proposes, which is that Lina is, in fact, a double agent, working for Esterhazy. So, she wants to lure the investigators into a trap by giving them the only thing that can actually destroy Esterhazy!?

So let us just drop the comeback of Lina Desmond… and if we want to explain the famous photo with the investigators at the Palace of the occult… let us say that the coven has developed a wealth of rituals and spells related to film. What if they use film as an oracle? Let us say that Lina learned some of their rituals while infiltrating the coven. She could have used the oracle ritual to create a photo of the people that could stop Esterhazy. And thus got a photo with the investigators at the centre, a photo that showed her the future… this will also explain how the coven can learn about the whereabouts of the investigators if they are very well hidden but the story is becoming boring (my solution to paralysis analysis is throwing some danger at the investigators, but for that they have to be localizable by the bad guys - and some of my groups suffer from a lot of paralysis analysis but are extremely good at hiding).  Also, I made it such that the photo changes to accommodate change to the most likely future. For instance, if an investigator dies before the visit to the Palace, they will disappear from the photo.

This is one of the main changes I made to the scenario. As for the clues that Lina provides, very few are really important, and any occultist in Berlin (Belshazzar, Gregorius, Grau, Crowley…) could know about them, at least in the form of rumors. 

I added that Crowley can tell the investigators about the rumor that Esterhazy has created a soul vessel to protect her from death. He can explain what a soul vessel is in Ancient Egyptian magic: essentially, a statue that serves as a double of a person and protects them from any harm. He can mention the picture of Dorian Gray as a modern story based on the same idea. The only way to kill the owner of a soul vessel is by destroying the soul vessel. It's up to the players to figure out that the film in the manila envelope was the soul vessel.

Remember also that Crowley doesn’t like Gregorius and Grau, and that he should probably have an extremely contemptuous view of Grunau. 

Speaking of that, another  thing I changed was the relative importance of Grunau. Grunau is being fooled by Esterhazy. His Necronomicon movie is never going to work, because the magic film created by Esterhazy is a ploy to steal the souls of everybody involved in the production, not a way of giving any extra magical power to Grunau’s invocation. I made it such that by 1932, Grunau is seen by many in the occult community as a joke. Grau and Gregorius have nothing to do with him anymore, and he sees the invocation of Yog-Sothoth on film as his way of proving that he is a great wizard. Little does he know that Esterhazy has completely different plans.

Other than that, I run the scenario as written.

At the end of this scenario, the Nazis are winning the elections, and the Weimar Republic period is over. The Nazi dictatorship is about to begin. For once, all the horrors of the Mythos that the investigators fought against are a lot less horrible than what Hitler will unleash upon the world.

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