Wushu Skidoo

“The pipe. We should use his pipe.”

“Um, I’m getting a pretty big spike," his partner replied. "I think we should…”

An invisible semi-truck hit Savoie in the chest, slamming him up against the rafters and pinning him in place. “Bring… them… up…” he forced the words out past the crushing pressure on his lungs. His partner flew down the steps like a man possessed. Savoie clutched the five spot pendant around his neck and sucked in just enough air to avoid passing out.

An old man flickered into existence beneath him, one hand outstretched towards the detective. He opened his mouth as if to scream, but brackish water poured out in impossible quantities. It reeked of the swamp, crowded the oxygen out of the room. The detective's vision filled with motes of light. Blood pounded in his skull.

Someone screamed behind him and the ghost spun around, dropping Savoie to the floor in a heap. A woman stood at the top of the ladder, an infant child in her arms. “This is Zurie and her daughter, Olivia,” Savoie gasped. “The rescue team that passed you by was on its way to save her. She was already in labor.

"Now, we're gonna bury your pipe at a crossroads and you're gonna rest in peace."

I love hoodoo. I love its down and dirty, uniquely American approach to magic. I love its pragmatism; rootwork is all about finding supernatural solutions to common, everyday problems. Sadly, in the months following Hurricane Katrina, many rootworkers’ “everyday problems” expanded to include finding drinkable water, fending off looters, and ducking private mercenaries. Role-playing in a post-disaster setting may seem macabre, but times of tragedy give rise to heros as well as horrors.

New Orleans After the Storm

Six long, desperate months have passed since Katrina, and life in the Big Easy is anything but. Less than half of the city’s population has returned. Many areas are still without running water or electricity. Saint Bernard’s Parish looks like a war zone.

Despite it all, Mardis Gras is alive and kicking. As the tourists trickle in, a handful of restaurant- and hotel-owners struggle to make the French Quarter presentable. Making it secure is another matter entirely. Even with the National Guard out in force, the lightless streets of New Orleans are lawless in the extreme. Looters and vigilantes wage war over food, water, and territory. Private security firms guard the bastions of the wealthy, but some commit as many crimes as they prevent. In most neighborhoods, it's every man for himself.

The dead are everywhere, and they are angry. Vengeful ghosts haunt the places where they drowned or starved or fell to violence; putting them to rest means righting wrongs and bringing the guilty to justice. Restless dead shamble through the floodwaters that washed them from their graves; Baron Samedi reanimated their bodies, but he did not return their souls.

Supernatural threats lurk among the living, too. Wicked bokor, Christian theurgists, and rootworking criminals have descended upon the city like vultures. Along with the other looters and survivalists, they're picking its bones clean. In response, the police department has commissioned a special team of occult investigators...

The Graveyard Shift

The Big Easy's occult underground runs on Vodou ("voodoo," to the uninitiated), but that's neither the beginning nor the end. Detectives who work the Graveyard Shift must be versed in hoodoo, necromancy, Wicca, Thelema, Enochian, and arts even more exotic. However, this knowledge is mostly academic, the same way that cops know about crime.

Investigation is their primary skill set: crime scene reconstruction, criminal profiling, surveillance, interrogation, etc. There's plenty of room in there for player-characters to carve out their niche before you even mention magic. The same goes for combat skills. Technically, police detectives would call out SWAT to do the heavy fighting, anyway.

In fact, you can roll those NPCs right into PC Traits. For example, a character with "Forensic Science" as a Trait wouldn't have to do all the lab work herself. She could gain dice by describing the actions of her underlings back at the lab, then roll against her own Trait to resolve those actions. A character with an "Urban Combat" Trait could do the same with members of the SWAT Team. The PCs themselves don't even need to be present. (There’s no real reason this gimmick wouldn’t work in any system, just replace “gain dice” with “apply modifiers” or whatever.)

The Graveyard Shift is an open secret. Beat cops have been told to give them their full cooperation, even if they don’t believe in ghosts or zombies. Local reporters have heard rumors, but the detectives are under strict orders to prevent a public scare, so cameras are not allowed on their crime scenes. The denizens of the underground are all too aware of the task force. Truth be told, most of them need law enforcement as much as the refugees and survivalists, but they’re not used to trusting The Man. (At least one of your PCs should have local contacts of the occult variety.)

Aside from that, work is work. The Graveyard Shift processes crime scenes, questions witnesses, and pursues suspects. Of course, the courts aren’t really equipped to handle most of their perps; you can’t handcuff a ghost or keep a bokor in jail for long. That's why the detectives are given broad discretion to execute sentences as they see fit.

Vengeful Ghosts

The dead have plenty to be angry about. Maybe rescue helicopters left them to die in favor of someone with a better chance of survival. Maybe looters shot them dead for daring to defend their homes or families. Maybe cops mistook them for thieves and decided to put the city’s “zero tolerance” policy into effect. In any case, their fury survived both the storm and the grave. Now, they haunt New Orleans like rats in the walls, gnawing away at what little the living have rebuilt.

Ghosts make superb plot devices. Their thirst for revenge can lead your detectives to just about any crime scene: homicide, hit-and-run, robbery, burglary, drug deals, blackmailing, kidnapping, you name it. You can play it subtle and spooky, but I prefer to crank the old PK meter up to eleven! Victims should be slammed into walls, pinned to ceilings, attacked with projectiles, and tossed around like rag dolls. Apparitions should be solid and move fast, maybe with a little of that contortionist-on-crank stuff from The Ring and its ilk.

When your players get tired of having their asses handed to them by phantasmic 10-year-olds, it’s time to get on with the police work. The best way to put a ghost to rest is by bringing those who wronged it to justice. That gives you an easy tie-in to mundane criminals of any stripe, despite the Graveyard Shift’s metaphysical mandate. I recommend looters, mercenaries, and crazy survivalists. If that fails, there's always necromancy, hoodoo, and exorcism.

Restless Dead

Spirit logic can be obtuse, but Baron Samedi's reason for animating the corpses of his followers seems straight-forward: he did it so they could walk back to their graves. On the way, many of these restless dead cross paths with the living, and such encounters never end well. Others cannot find their graves, usually because they are no longer there to be found, and end up haunting the places they knew in life.

No two restless dead are exactly alike. Some are gruesome shamblers, rotted through and infested with maggots. Others are little more than piles of bones clothed in tattered scraps of flesh. Even those who died shortly before the storm are noticeably decomposed. They don't hunger for brains or anything like that, but they are easily angered, utterly amoral, and virtually unstoppable. Putting them to rest requires returning them to their graves or burning them to cinders.

There are many means by which the restless dead can be controlled. Vodou is the most direct route, since it is the power of the Loa that brings them to unlife. Necromancy is certainly applicable, though it usually treats the corpse as merely a cage for the soul. Hoodoo and the Hac Tao might have relevant tricks up their respective sleeves. The end result is always the same: a single-minded, unkillable thug under the thumb of some conniving witch doctor.

Witch Doctors

The Big Easy has always had supernatural crime and detectives who specialize in fighting it. The ghosts and zombies are a new phenomenon, as is the Graveyard Shift, but humans who work bad mojo for fun and profit are old hat. In fact, the detectives have probably tangled with most of the usual suspects many times before, so they make great rivals and archvillians.

Your standard, New Orleans witch doctor is a Vodou sorcerer who has discarded service to the Loa in favor of his own bag of dirty tricks. They’re called “bokor” and their approach to magic is ruthlessly pragmatic. Most will be experts in Vodou and hoodoo, and at least passingly familiar with esoterica from Thelema to necromancy. The wicked and desperate turn to them for curses, divination, and protection from same. If you cross them, they’ll steal your soul and sell your corpse as a zombie slave.

Unlike the Graveyard Shift, many local bokors see the undead infestation as a natural resource. They turn vengeful ghosts into invisible spies, thieves, and saboteurs. The restless dead become their enforcers and assassins. Every ghost the Graveyard Shift puts to rest is one less footsoldier for some greedy bokor’s private army. Needless to say, it pisses them off.

Strange Angels

The Archdiocese of New Orleans considers the Ursuline Convent its crown jewel. Built long before the Louisiana Purchase, it is the city's oldest building. It was converted into a museum several years ago and its grounds also include Saint Mary's Cathedral. Katrina left it largely unscathed, but its doors have remained closed nonetheless.

Presently, it is under the protection of a group of nuns called the Daughters of Enoch... and the terrible angels at their command. Unfortunately, the devastation has caused many of the Daughters to suffer a crisis of faith and, recently, they’ve begun selling their services on the open market. Angels now guard high rise apartments, invisibly escort convoys, and keep watch over many of the city’s movers and shakers. It's only a matter of time before theft, kidnapping, and assassination find their way onto the menu.

These aren’t your typical, storybook angels. They’re forces of nature, incomprehensibly alien. The Daughters control them through Enochian, which they call “the language of Adam.” You can shop around the very long list of Enochian angels, but I prefer to plumb the apocrypha. There’s nothing like that old school flavor.

Two of my favorites are:

• Uriel, aka. The Flame of God. The visual appeal alone is tough to resist. Plus, Uriel has been identified as an “angel of death” more than once. I’d describe him as an empty silhouette wreathed in fire.
• Samael, aka. The Venom of God. This tester of men’s faith is often mistaken for the Devil, but Samael is no fallen angel. The Daughters summon him to mislead their enemies and, if necessary, send them to their Final Judgment.

Pick Me Ups

After a group of marauding survivalists raids his neighborhood, a bokor sends the restless dead to hunt them down. Most of the slaughter goes unnoticed, but the Graveyard Shift gets involved when a Mardis Gras crowd watches a severely decomposed man beat a white kid to death. Identifying the victim will lead them to the survivalists’ compound, which is now the scene of a mass murder. To stop the killing, the detectives will have to track the compound’s stolen loot back to its source, identify the bokor, and make the arrest before his undead thugs lurch to the rescue!

The Catholic Church is using the post-Katrina chaos to cover an occult power grab! The Daughters of Enoch are their heavy hitters, but they’ve also brought in a crack team of exorcists and some devoutly Catholic Santeros (practitioners of Vodou’s Cuban cousin, Santeria). They’ve been shaking down occultists all over the city, ransacking their shrines and confiscating their relics. Depending on the circumstances, they may approach the Graveyard Shift as allies, rivals, or enemies.

All crimes have a motive, but not all motives are criminal. One crusading rootworker has cajoled a vengeful ghost into playing Little John to his Robin Hood. Together, they’ve been robbing banks, armored cars, and supply trucks all over the city. The proceeds go straight to the poorest of Katrina’s victims. When the Graveyard Shift is tasked with stopping the robberies, it puts the detectives' loyalties to the test. Who’s side are they on?

The Graveyard Shift is called to the scene of a ritual murder. Was it a Vodou rite gone bad? Actually, the evidence (bullet casings, tire tracks) points to a private security firm. Investigation reveals that the mercenaries are being picked off one by one, torn to shreds by an unseen force. Increasingly desperate, they blamed the local mambo and took revenge on her and her followers. Now, the detectives will have to bring a bunch of paranoid paramilitaries to justice and put a murdering ghost to rest!

Next Up: The post-cyberpunk future of Datarchy!