LeviathanTempest:LlenlleawchDumpingGround

Dumping ground for Llenlleawch

Hunter Compacts

The Irrational Economic Actors Task Force

Founding

« Cleansing ». It's not a nice word, and it's not a nice job, but it was done. After the Second World War, countries of Western Europe had to root out the collaborators, the traitors and war profiteers, and purge them from the positions of power they had attained under German or Italian occupation. In Germany and Austria, the territory was even occupied by the Allies, who ran this intense denazification programme. The investigators who did this were a unique blend of policemen, accountants and spies. Several of them, in the course of their investigation, discovered a terrible truth: that the men and women who had richly profited from the chaos and tyranny of war were sometimes more than humans. They say that man is the worst monster, but they're not always right.

Several investigators tried to strike back, and were destroyed utterly. But safety was in numbers. Former resistance networks were reactivated, weapons procured, requisition orders forged. In 1946, detective Edwin van Geerts, Major Gaston Buffalat and Occupation Commissioner Harold Fellowes held the first international cooperation meeting on supernatural cleansing. Experience came from any source they found: turncoat Nazi occultists, politicians with an in on the dark sides of the Church, American friendly special forces. The meetings became regular and eventually merged smoothly into the burgeoning European Communities.

Nowadays, the Irrational Economic Actors Task Force is one of the myriad bodies gravitating around the Commission building in Brussels. It is a think tank, a quango, a semi-private reflexion group dedicated to monitoring supernatural activity. With the quelling of continent-wide fears of warfare, its focus has shifted largely to economic analysis. It is also an informal meeting group for agents of several European intelligence agencies which have maintained a presence there, co-opting colleagues with a special experience in the field of monster hunting.

The Enemy

From the beginning, the Task Force has been looking for powerful individuals or groups with no natural reason to exert that much power. Nowadays, this is largely the same. Maintaining such a complex system as the European economy running is an exceedingly difficult task at best, and no one wants to deal with the effects of inhuman monsters exerting an undue influence on entire cities.

That said, when it's do or die, the Task Force doesn't shy away from direct action. Its members are experienced and well-connected, and the balance struck between agencies and agendas mean that it's not often they can sub-contract the elimination of a supernatural threat to a mundane agency without repercussions. They tend to act very professionally, even if they aren't equipped with the skills or gear the situation would require.

Hunters

You were a bright student, straight As all the way, a scholarship to the best university in your country, and a real ambition to change things. So you joined as a parliamentary assistant to an respected MEP, only to find that your mentor was ultimately devoted to an eldritch monster feeding on the spoils of power. You made a few calls, and you lent a hand when the time came. You made a difference. It gets addictive.

You never expected it to be like James Bond. You wanted to work in an office, doing data analysis, and you were good at counting nuts and bolts and figuring out the telltale descrepancies. Then you noticed something you shouldn't have and your national agency foisted you away to Brussels. Now you're standing in a rain-drenched doorway in Prague, on lookout for the creature whose crypt your unit is currently bugging. And what will you do when it comes back?

At heart, you're an investigative journalist, and you've done your best work with phone calls in the hallways of your small country's ministries, uncovering corruption and crime. You were tired of puff pieces and mudslinging jobs, so you accepted a consultancy. It turned out your clients were using you in a turf war between creatures older than your own country was. When things got physical, you only survived by sheer luck. You made a few calls to friends, and found this job. It's nice to have some backup for a change.

Factions

The Task Force itself is small, but its turnover rate and extended contact network means it can rely on many more people than those just on the payroll. Over time, differences of opinion emerge.

Hacks are devoted to keeping things running smoothly. They want what's best for Europe's citizens and markets, and nothing creates panic more than unwanted news. Many of them come from backgrounds in economics or government. They will keep the monsters down so everyone else can live, but it's just as important to be diplomatic and smooth than it is to go guns blazing.

By contrast, Troubleshooters see themselves as consultants hired on retainer to solve particular problems. They often have previous monster-hunting experience and are called in when the Task Force encounters issues they cannot solve by activating their government or intelligence contacts.

Finally, Wonks are the strategists of the group, the big thinkers with vision, or at least that's how they see themselves. They tend to come from business or academia, and compensate their lack of practical experience with a surprising breadth of knowledge. Wonks usually hold the Chairman position.

Free specialties: Hacks: Persuasion (Politicians) or Persuasion (Public Servants). Troubleshooters: Subterfuge (Vacate the area) Wonks: Academics (Economics)

Status

The Task Force is just as much of a backbiting, scheming place as one would expect. Still, experience and skill sometimes get noticed and rewarded.

0: You've been asked to do a presentation for the Task Force, and consulted a couple of times. You gain the Economics specialty for free in either the Investigation or Politics skill.

000: You're on retainer or on permanent assignment to the group, and have started to build a network of contacts. You've also gone in the field at least once on an investigation or an elimination job, and you've more than likely taken serious risks for your life or career. You gain two dots in the Contacts merit.

00000: You are known as not only an expert in your field, but as the guy people should turn to when they meet unexpected trouble. You're so good at noticing telltale signs that you can do it unconsciously now. You gain the benefit of the Unseen Senses merit, but it is only triggered when you put together evidence of a supernatural being's activity (i.e., it does not work at close range).

The Season Letters

Founding

It began with little more than a desperate hope and a postage stamp. On a dark, wild night in 1912, Dr. Rupert Season of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote to his good friend Eamon Campbell. Season was an alienist who had been treating a patient so strange, so self-possessed and so haunted, that Season himself felt he was coming close to the edge of the abyss. Campbell, a professor of mythology at Trinity College Dublin, immediately wrote in turn to several friends of his, until one day, a few weeks later, a grim former medical surgeon knocked on Season's door. It was too late: the good doctor had already succumbed to the infectious madness his patient propagated, and was turning into a mindless monster. Season stalked his visitor throughout the night streets of Providence until he was cut short by a runaway train.

After this tragic experience, Campbell decided to look deeper. He structured his network of epistolary contacts into an intelligence-gathering information and tried to locate Season's original patient. But Campbell was not after revenge; it was curiosity that motivated him so. He finally found the man and, armed with certain precautions suggested by his friends, went to meet him. He survived the experience, and although he was plagued to the end of his life by nightmares, went on to write his most brilliant work.

Over the years, other cases have popped up of similar supernatural cases, and Campbell's group (now known formally as the Season Letters) reported them, corralled them and studied them. Originally mostly made up of academics in the fields of psychology and history, it has expanded into several other fields, including a number of officers and businessmen. It still works mostly at a distance, with email and postage mail representing most of the work, until it is time to meet the creatures that go bump in the night.

The Enemy

Unlike some groups which want to explain the supernatural, the Season Letters take its existence largely for granted. They don't want to study monsters, but to learn from them. What insights on history can be learned from an immortal creature of the night? What aspects of psychology can be revealed by an inhuman intellect? Can spirits of the hive teach us why humans work together as they do?

The Season Letters tend to follow the same methodology repeatedly: identify a supernatural element, ask their contacts for any information they might have on it, gather the right precautions, and finally organise a meeting. They are not fools, and are very aware that sometimes a monster must be subdued before it can be questioned. And if they kill, it's usually only to protect themselves from possible retaliation.

Hunters

When you came home from the war, they gave you psychological counselling and told you your mind could betray you if you didn't take care. Well, they were wrong. You're solid as a rock. It's your wife who'd gone insane while you were away, falling under the sway of something you couldn't even face. You had to ask for help.

There's a side of your work in archaeology that is so very frustrating, building hypotheses and never being able to test them unless a lucky find came your way. It used to keep you awake at night. You would have done anything for a bit of certainty. In fact, you have. And it's felt good.

You've been a hack for years, writing formulaic books by the page count for a negotiated fee, an industrial purveyor of platitudes for bored housewives. Until you met her. Until you found inspiration. For the first time in years, you've created something that is good and true. It's so sad you had to kill her in the end. You have to look somewhere else for your next book.

Factions

The network is too disorganised for structured factions to emerge. Nevertheless, for people who meet very rarely, reputation is everything, and certain tendencies have been clear for a long time.

You won't find Larks in the field. They're happy to serve as sounding board, to provide advice and analysis, but they never get more involved than that. Most use pseudonyms and are only know to those who have recruited them into the network. Because more proactive elements resent them somewhat, they spend their time currying favor to get feedback on fieldwork.

Cuckoos favor deep fieldwork, sometimes going so far undercover that their loyalties shift and they come to obey those they wanted to study. Nevertheless, much of the Letters' most important data has been gathered by them, and they inspire respect as well as fear.

Starlings are experts on meeting sessions. They routinely travel from location to location, setting up safehouses and wards to assist the local members. They generally stay during the meetings and are rewarded by information as much as money.

Free specialties: Larks: Academics (Reviewing); Cuckoos: Subterfuge (Blending In); Starlings: Streetwise (Safehouses).

Status

The Letters are a very informal network, but reputation is everything to people who rarely meet.

0: You have provided information on request by a member, and have been kept appraised of the result of the Investigation. You are also starting to work at a distance through contacts. You gain a free Written Word specialty in the Expression or Persuasion skill.

000: You have participated in at least one meeting session, and are well-known for your insight within the network. You have come across dozens of reports from across the world. You gain two dots in the Allies merit.

00000: You are one of the central hubs of the network, and those members that you don't know personally you can probably investigate and discover. You have survived several meetings with creatures, and not all of them have gone well. You gain the benefit of the Encyclopaedic Knowledge merit, if you have the time to ask your contacts in the network and receive their feedback.

The Tucker Street Outfit

Founding

The "boys from Tucker street" were one of the major players in turn-of-the-century London's crime scene. They were one of the original legendary outfits, known for robbing, running gambling dens and managing prostitution in the golden days of old-fashioned street gangs. They were also known for their very public excesses and for flaunting their power in the streets. Then, like many other organised crime structures, the gang collapsed. But it hadn't been muscled on or killed. It had fallen under the thumb of a mysterious man known only as "the Gent". For decades, the creature known as the Gent turned the original gang into his own discreet army of crime, exerting supernatural control over even the most strong-willed to hold the city in his grasp. He had turned the gang's rabble into a well-oiled profit-making machine, extending his tendrils across the world through his agents.

Then, one day in the early 1960s, the Gent disappeared. No one really knows what happened to him. There followed a few very confusing weeks for his cult of mind-slaves, but the Gent's two main lieutenants and high acolytes, Hugh Cullen and Glenn Abbot, decided to react. They reassembled the Tucker Street outfit and held tightly on to the reins of power, and the gang went on with its petty criminal activities, although infighting constantly threatened to break it apart. In 1971, the Outfit found out one of the crime bosses running the neighbouring area was not human. Using all the experience they had acquired under the Gent, the gang launched a night raid and destroyed him. The entire neighborhood was now theirs for the taking. A common enemy was found, unifying the gang. New business opportunities were suddenly open.

Since then, the Outfit has greatly expanded, opening affiliated gangs in many countries in Europe, Russia and North and South America. They see themselves as protecting their territories, but truly, their specialty is just bumping off monsters who are an obstacle to their expansion plans. The Outfit is now an international corporation, with very strict rules about authority and profit sharing, but it is also built as an underground army. Like every army, it needs enemies to stay together, and monsters provide this enemy.

The Enemy

The Outfit is interested in every field of grey- or black-market activity, with a predilection for their original specialties in gun running, gambling and protection racket. They have noticed that when a monster creates a power base in organised crime, it tends to stay isolated, rarely creating alliances with others of its kind or with competing crime bosses. This allows them to strike with relatively little fear of retaliation, as long as the supernatural influence is rooted out entirely on the first go.

Like many gangsters, the Outfit sees itself as rebels, and experience a powerful sense of shame at the long years spent in mental servitude to an inhuman being. Therefore they will go out of their way to hunt and destroy any supernatural being that they see as remotely threatening to their operations, and portray themselves as heroes in the community they are exploiting. They are not above selling their services, either, in the grand tradition of hired killers. The fact they are specialised in the hardest possible targets to kill allows them to extract extremely high fees. If some of their clients are also monsters, that's fine... until the Outfit sees a reason to bump them off too.

Hunters

You were a cop, and you did your best, but when you tried to take down an up and coming kingpin, the department hung you out to dry. You and your family suffered the price. So you turned to your street contacts. Some hoodlums from another neighborhood took him down, free of charge and no questions asked. You saw what it took to take the fight all the way to the bastards. You handed back your badge and never regretted it.

Had you been born somewhere else, you'd be an academic, a spin doctor, a virtuoso in strategy and politics. But you were born on the street, and that's where you exert your talents. You don't have much against those poor bastards with the funny faces and the deformities, but you've got to keep your troops sharp. They fight back, but you're tougher.

To you, it's all about business. Fair and open competition is the only way things work out for the best, right? Except these things don't play fair. They have dirty tricks to play with people's minds and make them forget what a good deal you're offering. Well, you've got a couple of tricks up your sleeve too.

Factions

Over time, the Tucker Street Outfit has expanded in many areas, both socially and geographically.

The Locals are the everyday operators. They keep the outfit's businesses running, provide management for mundane crime. They're also the eyes and ears of the outfit, out on the streets. Most of their job is sorting the gossip and rumours from the real info, but they happily lend a hand when action is needed.

The Family Boys have retained most of the outfit's rites and scriptures from its days as a cult organisation. They provide links with the rest of the outfit and keep everyone focused on the prize. They can fill any role, from capo to adviser to gang-banger.

Finally, Old Hands are a bunch of experienced gangsters who tend to develop the same approach to life after a while: a growing obsession with hunting monsters, to the detriment of the business side of things. They're used as resources but all too often kept at arm's length by leaders with a more materialistic point of view.

Free specialties: Locals: Streetwise (Rumours); Family Boys: Socialise (The Initiated); Old Hands: Firearms (Rifles).

Status

As with most organized crime, the Outfit is a very hierarchic and ritualised society.

0: You've been blooded in and have started to take part in the Outfit's criminal activities. You have also done some outlying work for monster-hunting, such as intelligence gathering or surveilance. You gain a free specialty in Firearms or Streetwise.

000: You've been formally initiated in the Outfit and enjoy a certain amount of protection because of it (think of it as being 'made' in the Mafia). Because you've proven yourself on the frontlines, you now gain access to a share of the pie. You get two extra dots of Resources, representing your involvement in various trafficking.

00000: You're one of the major crime figures in your area. You are very well-versed in the local supernatural landscape as it intersects with crime and underground activities. You gain four dots in the Retainer merit, representing your loyal men, allocated however your like.