“Bernice Cartfield: A Delta Green Antagonist” — written by Greg Stolze, (c) 2011 — appears in The Unspeakable Oath 19.

The Unspeakable Oath 19 is available in PDF and in print with free PDF download.

Bernice is a thoroughly detailed NPC ready to be added to a campaign, and like all great NPCs she’s more than just a villain. By her lights she’s merely a woman with an unusual background just trying to get by. She could be an antagonist for Delta Green investigators, but she could also be a useful ally. She should always have her own agenda.

Here’s a preview, illustrated by Dennis Detwiller, (c) 2011.

Bernice Cartfield: A Delta Green Antagonist

Bernice Cartfield is an antiques dealer in her forties. She has a grad degree in museum studies from Northwestern and a discreet storefront operation in a prosperous suburban downtown. Never married. More likely to be described as “stylish” than “attractive.”  According to her tax forms, her income from her store was $71,500 last year. She owns the left side of a duplex condominium.

She’s also a sorceress; but more than that, she’s a con artist.

Her exposure to the Mythos came early in her college years. She was pursuing a fine arts degree in Florida and got into a pissing match with fellow student Grant Franklin. Franklin idolized Richard Upton Pickman and she dismissed Pickman as a schlock merchant (and Grant as a schlock merchant manqué). Her rival got hold of a Contact Ghoul spell and made a hasty pact with a flesh eater to abduct her and reveal the reality of the occult to her. Unfortunately for Franklin, after dragging her back to his presence the creature decided the easiest way to complete the agreement was to eat Franklin’s brain. Bernice begged for mercy and (surprisingly) got it, in return for a promise to help the monster burn down the mortuary of a funeral director who knew all about ghouls and had been protecting a local cemetery from them for years.

Bernice was lucky. She didn’t get eaten, she got away with arson and she was never even questioned about Franklin’s death. She went to grad school far, far away with the disquieting knowledge that (1) there are monsters, (2) magic works and (3) there are people out there fighting the unknown.

It would have taken very little to turn Bernice into a Mythos-hunting investigator. She was bright, curious and capable. But in the process of trying to figure out what was really going on, she fell in with a subculture of knowledge perverts. Her peers (whom she disliked even as she came more and more to rely on them) wanted to find doors and pry them open. Bernice, without even considering it carefully, followed their path instead of trying to seal those gateways shut. She sought magic to protect herself from magic. (And she started learning how to fire a gun. But she didn’t start practicing twice weekly until after her encounter with Percival Bristow, as described on page 12.)

It’s a testament to her resourcefulness that she succeeded (somewhat) at the often quixotic and self-destructive quest for magical power. Of course, in the process she had to lie, cheat, and steal. Still does, really.

“Got Hold of” a Contact Ghoul Spell?

It’s not like Grant Franklin stumbled across it in the library. The student Bernice crossed had an uncle named James Franklin, a member of an occult organization called the Lamplighters. It was at James’ house that Grant first saw a book featuring Pickman’s work.

James was in the process of becoming what the Lamplighters called a “Humble One”—an empty vessel open to possession by alien powers—during Grant’s troubled adolescence. (Grant’s parents were divorcing, and his father was trying to reconnect with James just as James was pushing him away). During one of his last visits, Grant was left snooping around James’ study while James had an emotionally raw scene with Grant’s father. Grant came across his uncle’s fragmentary photocopy of Cultes des Goules. Years later, he pocketed the file while helping his dad get James’ affairs in order after James’ committal to an asylum.

James has, by the way, gotten much better. He’s been released, has nothing to do with his brother or nephew, and has been elevated to the rank of Shining One within the Lamplighters. He never did find his cruddy Xeroxed fragments of the Comte d’Erlette’s tome, but since he was in a fugue state when they vanished, he assumes they were thrown out with the rubbish.

(The Lamplighters are described in “The Cult of Transcendence” in Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity.)

Bernice Today

Bernice Cartfield is an antiquarian with a reputation as “odd” among other history buffs and “scary” among seekers after mystical wisdom. She does far more transactions with the former but makes almost as much money off the latter, through a careful policy of leavening a little dangerous truth with a lot of lies.

When she meets an occultist (and she meets many) Bernice initially tries to make a quick sale of something she can present as magically connected. Some of this stuff is authentic, historical and powerless. Other times, she unloads something fraudulent, or with a false provenance. She never knowingly sells anything with real sorcerous potential on a first date.

If she makes the sale, great. If the buyer declines, she makes an effort to maintain good contacts, even if that means admitting that she “sometimes sells something sketchy to keep the ignorant happy.” She’s friendly and knowledgeable, and she works at drawing her clients out of their shells with a sympathetic ear.

In time, she mentally files repeat clients into one of three categories:

Sucker. In Bernice’s eyes, people who want magical power and have no idea about the realities of the Mythos are a gullible resource to be gently fleeced as often as possible. She gets them hooked into purchases of antique (or at least antiqued) Tarot decks, rambling journals and “haunted” pictures. But sometimes they demand results, or they actually try to research that crumbling Latin tome she sold them and find out it’s an old psalter with an artificially aged “Daemonolatreia” cover. If they get pushy or angry, they get upgraded to the next category . . .

Seeker. People who’ve had some contact with the real item and want more are categorized as “seekers.”  Typically, she plays as dumb as she can, but if they call bullshit on her she comes (partly) clean and very accurately describes the crap she pulls on the suckers. With this confession she implies that she now recognizes the seeker as an equal and considers him worthy her real stock in trade. This usually culminates with a sale of Codex Peregrini Nefandae (see page 17). Her goal with these people is to help them self-destruct, full stop.

Sorcerer. She meets very few people she considers her equals or superiors. Someone who impresses or frightens her enough merits a treatment that’s superficially similar to her handling of seekers. She’s respectful, comes clean about conning suckers, admits to a deeper level of knowledge, but does not try to trick them into self-destruction. Mostly she just wants people like this to leave her the hell alone. She’s seen too many cases of sorcerer-on-sorcerer violence and has zero interest in winding up smeared across eleven dimensions while her soul rots in the petrified corpse of a dead rat. Money? Information? Addresses? Her genuine mystic tomes? Sure, take it, just don’t hurt her! Now, of course, getting this level of intimidation on someone who knows Vanish and Wrack isn’t easy, but enough hits to her SAN get you there.

Currently, at the top of Bernice’s “Persons To Fear” list is a gentleman named Percival Bristow, the Y’golonac priest who taught her the Vanish spell and supplied her with the powder package described on page 15. Anyone who killed Bristow would earn Bernice’s profound gratitude. But she has no idea where he is now or what he’s doing, and the terror she suffers in describing him to a sketch artist would force a SAN roll on her, risking a 0/1D6 loss. (Since his transaction with Bernice, Bristow has learned of the Dorian Gray Society, as described in “The Cult of Transcendence” in Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity. He has impressed himself upon them by demonstrating magical skill rather than the money and influence they usually require, and is an Extended Member bucking aggressively for promotion.)

Bernice is also scared shitless by Antoinette DeMonte (see “The DeMonte Clan” in Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity), though Bernice knows her in her guise as “The Sicilian.” They competed for the notes of a prominent voodooisant and The Sicilian won. Bernice did, however, get The Sicilian’s fingerprints and has tied them to Charles Matranga. This does not make her feel at all better.

Ginette Wirtz, a servant of The Fate (see Delta Green) known as “The Lady of the Land,” is one of Bernice’s clients, and unlike the other two they are still in contact. Ginette is the Network’s specialist in dimensional movement. You want something or somebody moved a great distance, out of a difficult position, into a difficult position? You get Ginette. Bernice helped her fill in some gaps in Keziah Mason’s history and sold her some objects purported to belong to the old witch, including a very skilled forgery of the Elder Thing statuette in the Miskatonic University museum. Bernice has categorized Wirtz as a “Seeker” and is gradually setting up a sale of Codex Peregrini Nefandae.

But the next copy of Codex Peregrini Nefandae is slated for delivery to Joseph Berg (see the “Tiger Transit” section in Delta Green: Countdown), who has made contact with Bernice in hopes of finding a way to mask himself from the Hound of Tindalos that’s pursuing him. They met through mutual connections in the “forged mystic antiques” trade and Bernice thinks he’s delusional. On the off-chance that he isn’t, she wants him summoning something that’s going to kill him without drawing out the process.

Bernice’s Store

Cartfield Antiques is stuffed into a corner of an old building that’s been remodeled too many times. Barely twenty feet across, the store stretches deep back into the structure, lined on opposite walls with bookshelves. Between them is a boulevard of glass-topped tables and display cabinets. Bernice sits at a rolltop near the front, keeping an eye on customers as they exit and enter. At the far rear of the shop floor there are two locked doors. One leads to a lavatory (customers only). The other leads to a rear store-room, far less decorative, almost as big as the storefront. The property Bernice rents is, in fact, L shaped. The sales space stretches the entire length of one side of the building, and the rear storage chamber runs along the building’s back wall. That’s where she keeps the real goods.

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Read more about Bernice Cartfield in The Unspeakable Oath 19.

Click here to order TUO 19 in PDF.

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