April 16, 2021
West Texas
A van of young people are arrested outside Odessa, Texas under suspicion of the murder of one Steven Ortiz. A former army veteran, Steven Ortiz’s headless corpse was found inside the van with what appears to be a swastika ritually carved into his chest. The arresting officer reported, “it was like his head just exploded” despite there being no firearms or even evidence of a firearm having been discharged in or at the vehicle.
This investigation will send the Agents down a rabbit hole of occult right-wing terrorism, wayward youths, information warfare, deranged ideologies, niche communities, fringe scholarship, and an anonymous online cult binding all these elements together. Over the course of the campaign, the Agents will monitor and potentially infiltrate this community in an effort to model its structure, unmask its leaders, and destroy it, hopefully with minimal collateral damage.
This is a playtest for a campaign using a new online threat group frahnk and I have developed. It’s gonna deal with some really ugly modern far-right ideology, occultism, and internet culture and will also deal with themes of self harm, alienation, racism, and mass murder.
Spoilers and Observations
Now this is a scenario I've run more than any other, and is probably the only scenario I've actually written up in a way another individual could actually run it. Funnily enough, its first incarnation was entirely improvised at around 3 am with several Euros on the Night at the Opera discord after a bing on foolhardy stimulants. It's seen several iterations since then, getting worse once, but generally improving.
I pride myself on this scenario on being very interview heavy, but also providing a lot of opportunities ot use a wide variety of skills that can tell the Agents a lot about the various NPCs they engage with.
I also found the usage of a friendly I made for my abortive Our Ladies of Sorrow campaign very helpful in this scenario indeed. Captain Otto Koller of the Texas Department of Safety and the Texas State Intelligence Team. Something you should know about me is I have a deep passion for detail and the byzantine structure of the security state.
The initial briefing of the scenario is designed to cast suspicion on the people in the van and somewhat relies on subverting expectations. Granted, the idea that a Mexican American man might actually be a Nazi sympathizer isn't so surprising in 2025, but I think it should still work more or less.
One of the things I changed, and using Captain Koller made this much easier, is that I had the survivors in the van, members of a noise rock band called MEDICATED AMERICANS and an 18 year old raver, being kept in solitary confinement by the Odessa PD and having been denied access to showers to wash off the gore of a man they just met. Their rights have very much been violated by Odessa PD taking Koller's instructions to keep them locked down until the specialist investigators could arrive too literally while having significantly atrophied empathy.
It took the players a little while to realize that these people have been covered in gore for nearly 24 hours and that they were deeply traumatized, but once they did they realized through utilizing the power of basic human decency they could very easily get them to be much more sympathetic by helping them get cleaned up and thereby distancing themselves from the acts of Odessa law enforcement.
Agents can and did quickly learn that the band driving the van, having just played a small music festival near Marfa, Texas, had no prior relation to Stephen Ortiz and were giving him a lift as a favor and because the 18 year old Molly Stuyvesant vouched for him (she had gotten the lead singers instagram at the festival and being a kind hearted girl on a lot of mdma, she felt great sympathy for the clearly troubled and frightend Stephen Ortiz at the greyhound bus station when it became clear a transfer wasn't coming.
Molly is easily in the worst shape of them all, entirely in hysterics, and requires either medicine, pharmacy, or psychotherapy to be made coherent. This is a good thing because she is the one who spoke to Ortiz the most and she's the one with the richest and most important parents. Agent HAZEL did a sterling job helping her through this traumatic event, and was rewarded not only with the most information but also got the thanks of the wealthy Stuyvesant family who pursued legal action against Odessa PD. A nice complication H-Cell was able to dodge.
That's another thing that's important to this scenario. All the most relevant NPCs are pretty young, and they have parents. Parents that can be help or hinderance, assset or liability, but regardless will have to be dealt with one some level. I introduced a slight ticking clock with the delayed but imminent arrival of Stephen Ortiz's family coming to reclaim the body. These are the mundane but extremely human obstacles I like facing my players with.
Talking to the others in the van, examing Ortiz's belongings, and examining the gore covered van, H-Cell was able to ascertain that he was coming from Globe, AZ with the intention of getting back home to Birmingham, AL. They find his journal going back a few years, he talks about not being able to relate to the other students in the English program because of his brief tour in Afghanistan, and not being able to relate to other "meatheaded" veterans. He's bitter about having to live with his parents, about not being able to get a job, about the world. HESTON and HAZEL are able to recognize clear signs of PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation.
Agent HELEN is able to crack into both Ortiz's laptop and his cellphone. In the phone, she finds a couple pictures taken about three days earlier of a male and a female in balaclavas, both clearly young, making cutesy poses in front of swastikas, slurs, and bastardized Elder Signs spray painted on the walls of a synogogue. She's able to quickly identify it as Congregation Silver Mount Zion in Scotsdale, AZ. It'll take a bit of effort, but HELEN is pretty sure she can use her NSA resources to trace the phone's metadata and get and idea of where he's been.
HELEN also notices his most used app is telegram, where he belongs to a large telegram group called "Bad Goys Bad Goys (whatta gonna do)" where he uses the screen name "Mauberlay" and is very close to two users. ZONNENRAND, who seems to be owner and personality the "community" orbits around, and his girlfriend SHIELD MAIDEN. The chat history is set to disappearing but she can still get some info from the private chats between the three. Apparently he was coming out to visit the two of them for a ritual. There's talk about scoring shrooms and peyote, and about an M16 rifle that's seen action in Vietnam.
The most recent messages are from ZONNENRAND and were sent between 3:49 am to 6:09 am April 15th and are as follows;
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