Friday, April 8, 2016

Adventure Idea- Inked Hands are the Devil’s Printshop

While planning out a campaign for my playing group I read over the rules for Demonolgy in the Victoriana 3rd edition rulebook. The section mentions some grimoirs are “Primed” so the simple reading of a passage will automatically perform a summoning or invocation. What a diabolical idea! Anyone could summon an otherworldly monster at any time! Possibly by accident!
In the Victorian world new print techniques spread information through the empire. Newspapers could be made faster and bigger than ever before, information was more readily available to all classes, and the lithographic rotary printing presses cranked out pages faster than ever before. All of which means, the stage was set for an evil minded printer with infernal aspersions to use these new information technologies for dark purposes. Here is a sinister plot of mass produced proportions:

Overview 
A small print shop produces posters, pamphlets, and stationary primed for demonic invocations and supplies them to anarchists and other malcontents. The papers are prepared in advance with a variety of effects such as Curse of Entropy, Whispering Colors, Fleeting Messenger, Imp Calling, and the assorted summoning of named entities.
Numerous prominent citizens have been attacked and killed by other worldly creatures. The police, ably assisted by Guild Investigators, are stretched thin. Can the player characters track down the source of the tainted documents?

Leggit Printers
A small printshop in a bustling neighborhood keeps busy making theater programs, small run pamphlets, and advertisements, but at night Leggit and his assistants produce malefic materials.
In the back room of Leggit Printers, a very old hand press made of a dark metal with odd sigils burned into the handle stamps through the night to produce the primed prints. The text and any illustrations are loaded into the tray and a covered in ink with a roller. Paper is loaded onto the tympan, covered by the frisket, and then the stamp is lowered by the printer pushing the handle.
The malefic nature of the work requires some modifications to the press’s usual operation. Each paper is printed with woodcut illustrations and embellishments providing the quintessence and connection needed for the invocation to work. Neither Leggit nor his engraver will say where the designs some from, but they always use wood stolen from the gallows for the illustrations. The compositor has to throw all the used type into the Hellbox to be melted down after each print run, due to the residual infernal energies that manifest in their arrangement. All the paper has been cropped down to cut off the manufacture’s watermarks and embossing. The ink used for printing is still mostly soot and linseed oil, but more esoteric ingredients may be added as needed. After a few hours of work, the finished prints are collected and locked in a tin box hidden behind a few loose bricks in the alley.
Leggit sends his innocent apprentices home for the day before he starts his nightly work, but both are getting suspicious. One glimpsed squat shapes lurking in the shadows of the storage room.

Motive
Leggit entered a demonic pact and must cause one-hundred demons to be the summoned into the world, but in exchange for what?
The world is separated from the Pale by a thin dimensional membrane. Leggit is working to disrupt the reality separating our world from the Pale. Each spell in a concentrated area makes the membrane a little thinner. 
Leggit experiments and practices his craft hoping to improve his technique. He wants to mass print a powerful grimioir full of dreadful magic. Selling his primed documents is just fundraising for a more terrifying plan.
A foreign power hired Leggit to destabilize the British Empire by causing chaos in her greatest cities.

This scenario should be a good gameable idea, as my group is currently playing this adventure. It's been great writing practical posts based on current gaming experiences, and apparently it's been great for you guys too, as this blog had views everyday in March! Thanks so much for reading.

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