Initial Hook: Two of the serpentfolk, the sole remaining members of a degenerate sect of Dagon-worshippers, have secreted themselves in a sea lion cave in Washington. Les Barret, an affable and all-too-normal CEO of a construction company who made unexpected bank off the legal weed boom, disturbed their slumber while trying to expand his wine cave. The reptilian cultists intend to summon a greater deep one, provided they don't kill each other first.

En Route Briefing: The agents are brought into a briefing in Oregon, at a building at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration harbor. They are given a terse primer of the program foundations. They are given this information as an induction into "BAD BOOMERANG" a working group to recover counterfeit copies of the Book of Dagon. Their next target is man named Les Barret who bought a copy from the Sotheby's auction house.

What Happened:

Barret Construction Home Office:
Les Barret:
Austin McNealy: Slighted former Executive Secretary. Knows Barret's schedule and is willing to talk. Holds Barret in high regard, and is convinced he failed him somehow.
Elizabeth Burns, Head of HR:

Travis Kennedy: Missing person and the banded one's new face. Blond guy, green eyes, kinda doofy overbite, otherwise normal-looking.

Free Clue: Travis Kennedy is Mr. Barret's new secretary. Their relationship is weird. Mr. Barret always kept his secretaries close and assigned them special projects, but Travis literally follows him everywhere like a trained puppy. They even carpool together in the mornings.
HUMINT: Nobody likes Travis. Everyone is creeped out by him, but everyone is too polite to say it.
Persuade: Everyone wonders why Austin (who everyone loves, and everyone knows loved his job) was transferred to HR. Even Austin himself doesn't know why (and he's devastated).
Accounting: Searching the papers in Barret's office yields a receipt that stands out from the others. A completely different account - Barret's personal checking account, it turns out - pays for the services of a geologist. The work site is listed as Barret's home address.
Psychology (Contingent on Accounting Success): Merging his personal finances with his business is weird, but not suspicious or criminal. In fact, he's taking great pains to make sure it isn't criminal - paying his secretary his hourly rate any time he helps with his personal finances, for example, and paying it from his personal account. This behavior suggests that Mr. Barret is a workaholic, seldom leaving his office, and perhaps a bit of a controlling personality.


Les Barret's Residence:
Eduard Hildago: The dead day laborer and the banded one's old face. Visible in security tapes.
Kara Whitley: Mr. Barret's personal secretary, preparing for a weird party.

Free Clue: Everything is neat and organized, but dusty. The maid comes only once a week. Expired groceries in the fridge. Mr. Barret clearly doesn't spend much time at home. There is a gaping, new hole in the wall of the laundry room, leading to darkness.
Alertness: You can smell the sea on the first floor of the house. It is strongest by the gaping hole in the laundry room.
Computer Science or SIGINT: Review of security tapes shows the night in question. Les Barret has a friendly chat with a man in a hat, as is his custom. The two drink cokes in his kitchen and chat for a bit. Barret receives a brief phone call. The two then head off-camera. They two return two hours and twenty four minutes later. Mr. Barret's clothing is covered in blood. He proceeds to vomit in the sink. The man in the hat then points upstairs, and Barret exits view of the camera. He comes downstairs in clean clothing, carrying another bundle of clothes, which he hands to the man in the hat. The man in the hat strips naked and wears the new clothes, leaving his hat and clothes on the floor. Both men leave together at about 9:30 PM. They return many hours later. Mr. Barret goes upstairs. The strange man walks off-camera. The recording cuts; there is no other footage after this point.
Search: There is cocaine and a little pot hidden in the false bottom of a sock drawer. More, after Kara delivers more...
Art (Architecture): This house is expertly designed but awkward to live in. The kitchen is beautiful but tiny for the relative square footage. So many tight, spiraling staircases that are pretty but a pain to climb and down every day... a pain that can become unbearable for anyone 60+ pretty quick. This is more an architect jacking off than a house.

The Cave:

Anyone entering the cave in total darkness takes 0/1 SAN loss from Helplessness. Entering with a light causes 1/1d4 SAN loss from

The Altar: The altar is composed of simple stone, and carved with runes that an Archaeology check will determine are quite similar to those in the surviving photos of the conical tablets from the briefing. The altar is otherwise mundane and normal, but several hypergeometric artifacts are arrayed on its surface:

- The false book of Dagon, the "bad boomerang" that the agents will need to recover. The serpents have yet to realize that it isn't real.

- A dodecahedron of polished hematite that, when held, will suppress a serpent's blood lust and allow them to recover 1 WP per round. The first time a human touches it, they face a 1/1d6 SAN threat. Touching the orb inflicts visions of black-angled cities, towering bipedal serpent beings, and intense sensations of drowning. Afterward, a human holding the orb gains 1 WP per hour, though they lose 1 SAN due to strange visions and a craving for human blood. They can boost the exchange rate to WP for 1 SAN a round by consuming a pint or more of human blood.

- A large but shallow soapstone bowl, filled to the brim with seawater. If two beings put their hands into the water at the same time, it will be begin to boil and burn like acid. As long as their hands remain in the bowl, the two beings can engage in crude telepathic colloquy. The two beings make a POW roll, and the winner will be able to ask a question. The question must be very simple: who, what, where, when, why, and maybe one or two words extra to suggest a subject. The other being then replies with a series of images. The answerer can attempt to "lie" or be obtuse by succeeding in a POW -40% check. Once the question is "answered," the roles switch, and the other being can put forth a single question and receive a response in a flash of images. This exchange costs 1 HP per being, per question. Beings reduced to 0 HP by this method fall unconscious and lose a hand, rather than die.

- A clay tablet inscribed with strange runes. It's used to call deep ones via the spell The Call of Dagon. The runes are actually correct, unlike those in the false Book of Dagon.

The Tall One: Ancient and out of touch. Doesn't actually want to "join father Dagon" or he would have done it by now. Doesn't trust his apprentice. Feels cornered and trapped and wants to survive. Would happily return to his ascetic existence if he could, but will roll the bones with Dagon before he lets himself get captured by monkey-things.

STR 19 CON 21 DEX 18 INT 20 POW 16

Changeling Feast, Fascination, Infallible Suggestion, Swarm, Call Forth Those From Outside (Greater Deep One), The Call of Dagon, Obscure Memory, Withering

The Banded One: Younger. Newly awoken. Afraid, but will never admit it. His faith in Dagon is shallow and shaken. He wants to leave his master, but a life hiding among the shallow monkey-things is unappealing.

STR 19 CON 21 DEX 18 INT 20 POW 16

Changeling Feast, Fascination, Infallible Suggestion, Call Forth Those From Outside (Greater Deep One), The Call of Dagon
This message was last edited by the GM at 01:14, Mon 21 Dec 2020.

Briefing Verbatim:

The reel to reel projector clatters, casting a series of silent images against the wall as Blevins speaks. "The group that would become the program we all know and love began as a federal investigation of the town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts in February of 1928. The U.S. Treasury Department investigation, in conjunction with the Office of Naval Intelligence, culminated in a raid on a cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon by the U.S. Marine Corps and the United States Coast Guard.

They were numerous... biological irregularities within the populace of Innsmouth." A stream of disturbing images from gutters from the projector: a black and white photo of a man in a newsboy hat with incredibly asymmetrical features. The x-ray of a human hand with several polydactilism, eight, too-long webbed fingers filling the screen like an alien spider. A misshapen thing in a basement, its clawed hands chained together and wearing a blanket like a cowl. Its features are obscured by the shadow of the blanket as a grim-faced young man with a carbine stands watch.

"More significantly, and germane to our current mission today, are the artifacts recovered on site." More strange images: a clay emblem of curved organic fronds, joined together in the center like a pinwheel. Ominous metal implements of hooks and spikes. A battered crown of whorled silver. "Most important of the recovered items were five 24 kilogram conical stone tablets. These cones were, it turned out, the holy book of the Esoteric Order of Dagon... for a certain given value of 'holy.'"

"The cones, along with the partial translations recovered from the cult, were turned over to War and State Department cryptographers for further decoding. The Cipher Bureau, the so-called Black Chamber, presented their findings on "The Book of Dagon" to a newly-elected President Herbert Hoover. Of course, they had the misfortunate to do this less than a week after Black Tuesday, and President Hoover was in what you could call 'no fucking mood.' Hoover - the other Hoover - spook par excellence, goddamn patron saint of the FBI, fascist in drag J. Edgar Hoover - retracted the report to save face. The Black Chamber went underground. The program was born."

Grainy historical images from the reels give way to newer pictures, color photos that look to be from the 70s and 80s if not later. Some actual footage of a man off-camera manipulating a book, turning its pages for the viewer to see. Only his gloved hands are visible. The book is a thick one, bound in leather. Its pages are yellowed with age and gilded with gold. "Now, with the history lesson out of the way, let's get to today's mission. The Book of Dagon was a major intelligence coup, but the hypergeometric principles it described were actively hazardous to human cognition. Worse, it wasn't the only copy. It quickly became apparent that there were other Dagon cults, other cone tablets, other copies of the Gospel According to Some Fish-Faced Fuck Thing. Our predecessors hunted them down, in secret."

A series of images. A basement with bricks of cocaine stacked alongside a pallet of books, with an ominous stain on the concrete floor. A marine standing over a misshapen body against a treeline. A small coastal chapel, burning. "For a time, the program considered hunting down Dagon worshippers their sole directive. Thankfully, our predecessors proved to be very fucking good at it. In 1955, one of the book's original translators suffered a mental breakdown and destroyed most of the program archives. This was back when "the program archives" were a thing, mind you. The unabridged translation was burned, the original tablets were smashed, but in the intervening decades, program assets manufactured several convincing forgeries."

"These 'dummy Dagons' were neutered. The alien characters and names were transliterated into historical-plausible Semitic languages. The true nature of the Dagon cult was obscured with some vague translation, and any actual hypergeometric content was edited out. Starting in the 30s and continuing as late until the 80s, several program operations seeded these false books of Dagon with influential book collectors and auction houses throughout the globe. The purpose was twofold; to generally discredit hypergeometry and the Order of Dagon with the neutered rituals, but also to serve as a honey-trap for wannabe wizards. Many would-be hypergeometric operators were intercepted and neutralized by the program before they could become dangerous, and many others appeared on the program radar solely because of their suspicious interest in the Book."

"Of course, now we are in the uncomfortable position of finding our forgeries rather valuable. With the original tablets and most Innsmouth raid records lost in '55, the fakes are now our best insight into actual Esoteric Order of Dagon practices. Furthermore, they're excellent fucking honey-traps. They have a pedigree, clear chains of ownership... as far as the academic hoi-polloi are concerned, our fakes are the real Book of Dagon, and have been for close to a goddamn century now. Three of the dummy Dagons are still in circulation, in the hands of museums, colleges, private collectors and auction houses. Aggressive program intervention has so far prevented their republication or wider distribution."

"Academics and occultists have pretty much lost interest in the Book of Dagon, so when a small-time construction company CEO suddenly started liquidating assets in order to purchase one from Sotheby's, we knew we had a bite. Meet Mr. Lester 'Les' Barret," Blevins begins handing out manila envelopes, a short dossier on Barret. "Founder and CEO of Barret Engineering and Construction, LLC."

"Mr. Barret was a fine, upstanding, tax-paying citizen before his interest in Dagon. Made bank building greenhouses, grow rooms and storefronts during the legal pot boom, but is by all accounts a pretty straight-laced guy personally. Your mission is to ascertain whether or not Mr. Barret is a threat. Why the sudden interest in the occult and pagan religion? If he's a just a hobbyist, that's fine. It might be good for the boomerang to cool off behind a collector's display case for a bit. But if there's something more going on, you have the program's full remit to recover the boomerang by any means necessary."
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:11, Sun 29 Nov 2020.

TIMELINE

Thursday - Mr. Barret is too excited, and opens the cave early.
Friday - Mr. Barret ordered the false Book of Dagon from Sotheby's and Travis disappeared.
Saturday- The book of Dagon arrives.
Sunday - Agents notified.
Monday - Agents board planes to  Newport.
Tuesday - Briefing

1:00 PM - Agents exit the briefing.

2:00 PM - Barret is working at the office and will finish out his shift at 5:30 PM, unless he has some reason to leave early.

3:00 PM - Kara Whitley, Barret's personal assistant, arrives to deliver several cases of beer, let a keg in, and meet with a drug dealer. She leaves the drugs his bedroom and leaves.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:13, Mon 07 Dec 2020.