Night's Foul Legions - The Biopsy

Night's Foul Legions, an alternate setting for Night's Black Agents.

PCs are counter-insurgency special operations who discover a demonic conspiracy and must now find who is among the possessed—the rebels/insurgents, the local authorities, civilians, or their own forces.

When I read this, I thought of how you could take the conspyramid from Night's Black Agents and flatten it out to make a relationship map, charting the spread of the demonic conspiracy as it spreads like a cancer.

Let's take the author's advice and imagine a game set in Northern Ireland, circa 1972. The players are MI5 Agents, or SAS, or undercover with the Det, or some other elite unit that gets to do as it pleases without following the rules.

The point of origin for the infestation is a fellow from Box 500 assigned to liquidate a local IRA cell. His extreme brutality has earned him the epithet The Strangler and the Republicans have a bounty on his head. Secretly, the atrocities he commits are interest payments on the demonic pact that gives him his power.

The conspiracy spreads outward from the point of origin like a cancer, corrupting the closest nodes, then the ones connected to those, and so on. The obvious first step are the Handsome Chaps - the Strangler's agents in the field: Sarah Doherty, an undercover agent in the IRA, and Rob Ogle, an Army Reconnaissance hitman who coordinates collusion with local Loyalist paramilitaries. The game would probably begin with these two already subverted, and working on spreading the demonic doctrine among the paramilitaries.

If either Max McKinley of the IRA or Terry Kingsley of the UVF get flipped before their subordinates are turned, the result is civil violence within the cell.

Republican Cian Connolly and Ulsterman John Wyrdheim are secretly partners in the drug trade, despite their membership in opposing paramilitary factions. The Handsome Chaps exploit this with blackmail, turning them into unwilling proselytes of the Strangler's patron.

The Strangler would love to convert his MI5 Handler Garret Carver. Not only does Garret have a wealth of surveillance information the Handsome Chaps would love to get their hands on, he also has the ear of both Sgt Blake Marrow in the RUC and Vicar Craig Coen in the COE, a cutout MI5 uses to coordinate with the UVF. (Also cut off by the right border of the photo)

IRA torturer Peter O'Hara is a wild card who unwittingly serves as an additional vector for the infestation. Anyone touched by the corruption is eager to reveal the demonic secrets of their power under interrogation. This information travels back to both local IRA leadership and the broader Republican movement. For every ten provos who despise the English use of dark magic, there's one willing to trade with dark forces if it removes the hated Huns from Irish soil. And if Peter himself gets turned, he becomes a vector in the other direction, an inquisitor who stops hurting you when you accept the Strangler's good news.

IRA financier and gunrunner Ron Seanessy brings in weapons and cash from the United States, but also liaises between Sinn Fein Councilman Remus Nelson and local IRA leadership.

Remus Nelson and his UUP counterpart Sam Morsette give political cover to the paramilitaries, legitimizing their underground war. Surveillance of either could tell the players a lot about the guerrillas' activities.

(I almost had the perfect visual metaphor on the map, with the "legitimate" organizations at the top and the underground ones on the bottom. Then I fucked it up by putting the British Army down with the paramilitaries)

Republicans and Unionists are willing to burn their own members who cause serious problems or get on the wrong side of an internal feud (this was most likely the fate of the Shankill Butcher, the real life inspiration for the Strangler). This goes double if the troublemakers are also dark sorcerers trying to kill you. Players who demonstrate their demon killing acumen could receive tips from militias looking to get the edge over their own possessed comrades.

You'd have a mechanic for upgrading the threat level of each node of the conspiracy over time, until they establish their own demonic pacts. Once the cancer spreads far enough, removing the Strangler from the picture doesn't stop it. Like killing a real insurgent leader and splintering the organization into cells, which continue fighting.

I think in order for the demonic possession thing to work thematically, it can't be an infohazard that infects you just by knowing about it. It has to be a conscious choice by the individual to accept power at a terrible cost. Like Faustus, or the Behilit.

Not sure how the cosmology of the world shakes out beyond that. Are there Angels to go with the demons? Do prayers and holy water work on demons? My first instinct is "no", but Night's Black Agents gets a lot of mileage out of the players learning which hokey vampire cliches actually work on the creatures of the night.

More to come if I think of anything else fun.