Let's Read: The Dracula Dossier (Preamble)

Not the cover for The Dracula Dossier,
but a cover by John Cassaday for a
comic book series in 2009.

I backed the Kickstarter for The Dracula Dossier, and I'm finally getting down to a serious reading of it. Many Gumshoe games have piqued my interest, but I've yet to play or run any game.

The Dracula Dossier intrigues me because (a) it involves the seminal vampire in the seminal vampire story; (b) it layers in not only a secret history of the original story, but it also; (c) layers in more secret histories that bring it up to the current day. Here's the summary, in the book's own words:

The Dracula Dossier (without italics) is an in-game artifact, the first draft of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. Written as an after-action report for Operation Edom in 1894, it was classified by Her Majesty’s Government, to be issued on a need-to-know basis to Edom operatives on later missions. Two of those operatives, tasked for Edom missions in 1940 and 1977, added their own annotations to one copy of the Dossier, providing a few answers and many leads. 

In 2011, that copy fell into the hands of a third denizen of Britain’s shadow realm, who added her own annotations — and when she disappeared, it showed up in your player characters’ computers, or in their hands. The Dracula Dossier is the annotated version of Dracula Unredacted. 

The Dracula Dossier (with italics) is a collaborative, improvisational Night’s Black Agents campaign, in which heroic Agents hunt and (one hopes) finally destroy Dracula, while they evade (and likely expose) the secret vampire program within MI6 known as Edom.

Bottom line: it's a lot of reading. But it does intrigue me in terms of how this improvisational campaign works. It seems a lot like (gasp) a sandboxy investigative modern game. It sounds really cool as an overall concept, and it also uses one of the things I loved about the classic Call of Cthulhu RPG: lots of in-game artefacts that are potentially critical clues or hints for the game.

I have a mad idea that I'll be able to shoehorn The Dracula Dossier into a Doctor Who RPG-powered game, with the team members all a part of U.N.I.T. -- but for now, I'll just read.