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The District Sleeps Tonight

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 9 months ago

A Role-Playing Campaign of Beltway Secrets and Cosmic Horror

Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green

using afraid by Vincent Baker

The year: 2022. The place: a remote cabin in West Virginia. The occasion: the reunion of friends who have not seen each other in ten years. They all graduated from college in 2004, and went to work in Washington D.C. that same fall. They gather from many places: the halls of power in Washington, comfortable upper-middle class homes, the secret crypts of intelligence agencies... the locked wards of insane asylums.

Back in the mid-'00s, these friends all were involved in discovering a government conspiracy, one that had existed in one form or another for more than 80 years in Washington. And their involvement led to their discovering secrets... not just governmental secrets but cosmic ones.

The newspaper headline on page A16 of the March 23, 2022 issue of The Washington Post didn't mean much to many observers: "Unusual Seismic Activity in South Pacific Baffles Scientists." But to these friends, it meant the activation of long-laid contingencies. The arrival at the cabin. The stockpiling of weapons and the theft of government data.

The beginning of the end.

Campaign structure: All players create their characters as they stand in June of 2003, freshly graduated from a Washington, D.C. area college. A solo prelude will be run for each character detailing their lives during the first two years out of school.

The first session begins with a deliberately-vague "reunion" scene at the cabin in West Virginia. Then we "flash back" to June of 2006 and continue to flash back and forth between the "future" and "present" throughout the campaign as details of the mid-00s are fleshed out.

Characters: All characters should be young movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. society. Congressional staffers, lobbyists, journalists/bloggers, lawyers, military officers, FBI trainees/rookie agents, scientists, academics, intelligence workers, non-profit workers, historians, employees of multi-national corporations, aspiring diplomats, executive branch Department workers, etc. They are all friends, who share a drink on the Hill at a hip bar on a Friday night. They will be drawn into events well beyond their understanding, slowly and inexorably.

Themes: Multi-generational secrets. Governmental conspiracies. The Faustian bargain. The intrusion of the incomprehensible. The decay of the American Empire.

Mood: Mostly Clancy-esque technothriller, part detective mystery, part cosmic horror, part "20-something" soap opera.

System: afraid.

PCs

Jason Moore, a.k.a. "Tom Sawyer," Entangled PR Flak and Spin Doctor	Jason Moore's CV
Hanson Fielder, Investigator, Technical Archivist, Library of Congress	Hanson Fielder's CV
Sgt. Alex Pham Harris, Entangled Soldier/Disturbed Veteran	Alex Pham Harris's CV
Jennifee Wolf-Goulde, Investigator, "Secret Math Girl," NSA	Jennifee Wolf-Goulde's CV
Samuel Edwards, Investigator, Navy ROTC Medical Student	Samuel Edwards's CV