Quote:
Originally Posted by Kale
Training exercise. @:-)
Seriously though, they are a recon unit, so if you wanted to keep the circle small while bringing overwhelming firepower (you hope) to the party the Royal Guards would be an ideal unit. You could dispatch them to a far corner of the desert as part of a clandestine op in a war zone. The tanks protect the PCs from the human dangers while the PCs take care of the supernatural.
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Spot on; old chap.
When I last featured the Shadow Court in a game, the year was 2010. At that time, they were just starting to become involved with the supernatural
outside of Great Britian and the Commonwealth, in that case a fact-finding mission (to Boston) in response to a particularly vivid prophetic dream on the part of HM. It resulted in friendly contact with some American nationals who had independently come across proof of the paranormal and at least neutral contact with agents of the Vatican. All in all, the Shadow Court gathered a lot of valuable information and set up information exchange agreements that might prove valuable in the future. At the cost, however, of revealing their existence to a foreign-born academic unwilling to join the group, albeit one vouched for by one of their own academics and willing to swear total secrecy.
I suspect that such foreign missions will occur again after 2010. With the assumptions made about magical metaphysics in the setting, the state of esoteric knowledge will be comparatively high among many less developed nations. Places where Westerners are feared or hated will also tend to feature some individuals exhibiting a certain willingness to use the arcane as a weapon. As a result, it won't be unknown for soldiers on active service to come across inexplicable phenomena and in this case, what they do not know
can definitely hurt them.
Before 2005 or so, only a few locations would have high enough mana for effective magic use and any supernatural creatures with a presence in the physical world would be sharply limited in where they could stay and for how long. It's possible that only one or two incidents a year would be dramatic enough so that those involved could not just write off what they saw and felt as adrenaline- and shock-induced hallucinations. As the 00s wound on, however, the frequency of hostile paranormal contact would go up among soldiers on foreign service.
Given that the Shadow Court has associate members and semi-aware contacts who are still serving officers, I imagine that rumours within the services would eventually reach the Shadow Court. If anything in those rumours indicates an
ongoing threat which cannot be dealt with by normal military means, I suppose that the Shadow Court might consider arranging for Rangers and some of their military members in the know to visit.
Why not just leave it to the Army, you ask? Maybe finally make that public announcement? Well, even if the years since 2000 has seen belief in the supernatural start a meteoric the rise among cops, soldiers and anyone else who has the potential to encounter it in the course of their duties, the vast majority of people still consider it a bunch of hokum. This is still our world and thus a world where most Western people grew up believing that such things couldn't be real.
After an encounter with something inexplicable with mainstream science, individual soldiers and officers might decide to believe their eyes and thus realise that the supernatural is all too real. It is, however, plausible enough that their superiors are less willing to sign off on a report that says sorcerers, jinn or monsters are real. More than likely, the military authorities prove unwilling to credit that even the strangest after-action reports represent proof of a genuine supernatural event. Or, at least, that was the situation in 2010 and I'm considering retaining it until at least 2013, if it's not too implausible.
That means that the amed forces would be mostly in the dark, but a certain proportion would lend some credence to the rumours going around. And the Shadow Court would have been quietly extending its influence among the officer corps for almost two decades*, preparing for the time when no more denial is possible and Great Britain must change to meet the challenges of the new world.
And if there is a need for covert expeditions, without the sanction of the official government, against foreign enemies of Britain who use sorcery as their terror weapon of choice, well, as you say, the Blues and Royals and the rest of the Household Regiments might turn out to be an ideal choice for the heavy ordnance and warm bodies to fill out such an expedition.
*Very slowly and carefully in the 90s, increasing their activities around 2000 in response to a greater realisation of the dangers involved and after 2005 some courtiers and associates would have become increasingly prepared to accept eventual discovery, as long as they succeeded in preparing the services for the dangers ahead.