Item Seed: The Divje Babe Flute [Night’s Black Agents].

So I checked with Pelgrane Press, and they’re cool with noncommercial fan material for Night’s Black Agents that doesn’t violate copyright.  Which is what I figured, but it never hurts to check, right? Especially when you may not know what, if anything, may be going on with ’em elsewhere. Anyhow:

the-divje-babe-flute-google-docs

The Divje Babe Flute [Night’s Black Agents]

The original form of this supposedly forty-three thousand year old flute was found in a Slovenian cave in 1995; and it was allowed to stay in the hands of mundane researchers for about a decade or so. It might still be in researchers’ hands if a forensic analyst with Poland’s Internal Security Agency had not correlated the positioning of the holes on the flute with a particular half-burned manuscript dating from the 8th Century AD.  Said manuscript told the tale of a powerful pijavica that had been warded off by the playing of ‘the Flute of Nebuchadnezzar:’ and the one drawing that survived more or less matched what pictures were available of the Divje Babe Flute. So the Flute was thus duly stolen, and surreptitiously replaced with a duplicate.  From there it was merely a matter of waiting until 3D reconstruction and printing was up to the task of ‘repairing’ the item.

And why did the ISA (which also means the entire American intelligence apparatus) want to reconstruct the Divje Babe Flute?  Because the music it plays has a proven effect on vampires.  The exact effect depends on the type of vampire in your Night’s Black Agents campaign [see page 120 of the NDA main rule book for more on vampire types, and pages 139-142 for more on vampire weaknesses]:

• Supernatural: The music creates painful resonances in the local metaphysics, as the vampire is forced to listen to the same tune being played with outer and inner ears at the same time, only ever-so-slightly out of sync. Playing music on the Flute acts as a dread on vampires while it is being played.
• Damned: It’s not just the song, or the flute: it’s this specific flute and a specific song, found in the original manuscript.  Using this bane on vampire knocks them down to Hurt.
• Alien: There’s a lot of math involved here, but it boils down to ‘the Flute generates a powerfully distracting subsonic interference effect.’ Treat as a standard block for any vampire within range.
• Mutant: There’s just something in the harmonics that affects the vampiric aggression centers.  A vampire hearing the Flute gains the compulsion to simply sit there quietly (unless attacked) for up to a minute after the user stops playing the Flute.

An open question is whether reproductions of the Divje Babe Flute will actually work: the reconstructed Flute works as described, but there’s some math (whether scientific or metaphysical) that suggests that the effects are not reproducible.  Whoever stole and recreated the Flute thus decided to try the reasonable experiment of making a new Flute, handing it to a field team, and seeing what happened next.  The results of that are, of course, up to the Director. But bear in mind that even a working Flute might not been enough to protect mere mortals from a suitably-motivated vampire.  Or, for that matter, that a vampire might not want to destroy an item that works just as well on other vampires as it does on him.