The Blood Fiend of Toledo [The Day After Ragnarok]

Toledo, Ohio is a haunted ruin. Just ask anybody. There was a plague, and then there was a huge fire, and then the usual Things moved in – and now the city’s abandoned. Except for the Things. Thankfully the Things keep to themselves, whatever they are, but smart people don’t go into the ruins. Especially once the drained corpses of various animals and lesser monsters started showing up on the outskirts of the city. The legend of the Blood Fiend of Toledo is already making the rounds of all the dives and pirate havens on the Great Lakes, and the tales get steadily taller.

Should a party of adventurers investigate the legend, they will of course discover that it’s a trap: the city is abandoned, but only on the surface. As soon as they’re deep enough into Toledo itself they will be surrounded, presumably captured, and ‘escorted’ underground to find the real Toledo: which is to say, the headquarters of a secret conspiracy to re-establish the United States of America in the Poisoned Lands. And no, nobody in California or Texas is aware that this conspiracy even exists.

It all started when former baseball player – and OSS officer – Morris ‘Moe’ Berg returned from the War in Europe just in time to see the Eastern Seaboard dissolve under a torrent of poisonous seawater. After the usual set of desperate adventures, Berg found himself in Toledo, which indeed had both the plague and the fire. For reasons best known to the man himself, he decided that the ruined city was now the perfect place to build an underground lair.

Improbably, he actually managed to get one up. Even after the Serpentfall there were still some intelligence resources in the Poisoned Lands, and Berg’s peculiar genius seems perfectly suited for the creation of a clandestine network of agents – and, in possibly the very near future, assassins. After all, Moe Berg possesses definite opinions about Nazis, Klansmen, would-be warlords, and general psychopaths (he merely entertains dark suspicions about most of the Mayoralities, California, Utah, and Texas). Berg’s organization – carefully unnamed – tends to attract former government and law enforcement agents of a similar mindset.

And very possibly, the player-characters. If captured, they’ll be brought before Moe Berg and offered one of three choices: work for his organization, keep their mouths shut about his organization while they’re leaving the area and never coming back, or die. Working for Berg means getting the occasional mission that’s ostensibly furthering the goal of rebuilding the USA. Keeping their mouths shut and leaving means precisely that, because the alternative is dodging Berg’s assassins for literally the rest of their lives. And death, of course, means death.

On the plus side, working for Berg also gives the players a reliable base of operations on the Great Lakes, which could prove highly useful. Besides, he and his organization are not actually evil. Just kind of fanatical about somehow accomplishing what is widely considered to be an impossible task.

Oh, and as for the entire blood-drained animal/monster thing? That’s from a project that one of Berg’s people proposed. US Army Sgt. Stanley Lieber argued that it might be possible to refine the blood of creatures exposed to the Serpent’s taint into a serum of some kind that might give him and the rest of his commando squad some kind of edge in combat; Berg’s chemists and biologists haven’t found one yet, but they have discovered a remarkable number of poisons. It’s enough to keep the research going; besides, ‘blood fiend of Toledo,’ and all that.