Table of Contents

Author’s Introduction................................................................................ 4
How to Run This Adventure..................................................................................... 4
CSI: Paris 1630..............................................................................................................6
THE DEMON TAILOR and the Grand Plan................................................8
Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu.......10

e
The Day of the Dupes.............................................................................................13
The Huguenots..................................................................................................... 14
Welcome to the City of Lights................................................................... 16

fil
Paris 1630 (Referee Map)......................................................................................20-21
Paris Map Key.......................................................................................................... 22
THe Unrest Die..................................................................................................... 24
City Encounters................................................................................................ 26
Taxi!............................................................................................................................... 28
Taxi Insignia............................................................................................................. 29
TIMELINE of TERROR..............................................................................................31
e
How the Characters Get Involved....................................................32
The First Letter.................................................................................................. 34
Crazy Taxi!..............................................................................................................36
pl
The Victims...............................................................................................................38
Victim #1: Claire Mollet..........................................................................................39
Victim #2: Rene Belleau..........................................................................................40
Victim #3: Henri Penand......................................................................................... 41
Victim #4: Julien Pascal.......................................................................................... 42
m

Victim #5: Bernard Rousseau................................................................................. 43

Victim #6: Blaise Bourgarit.....................................................................................57
Victim #7a: Baptiste Galonnier.............................................................................. 60
Victim #7b: Henriette............................................................................................... 61
Victim #8: Jean Dupont........................................................................................... 61
Sa

2
 Table of Contents (cont.)

The Wizard.............................................................................................................44
The Wizard’s Tower(ing townhouse).............................................. 46
New Spell:Unveil the Presence of the
Dread Vampyre (Detect Vampire)......................................................... 49
The Survivor...........................................................................................................52

e
The Werewolf of Paris..............................................................................................53
The Barrel...............................................................................................................56
The Second Letter.............................................................................................58

fil
The Final LEtter................................................................................................. 62
Barricades and Checkpoints.................................................................... 64
BLUE CLOAKS.............................................................................................................65
THE COURT OF MIRACLES................................................................................... 66
The Crimson Carriage of the Sun........................................................... 68
The (Demon) Tailor’s (Demon) Hideout........................................... 72
The (Demon) Tailor’s (Demon) SHOP.....................................................73
e
MY BROTHER’s KEEPER....................................................................................... 76
Rumbled! (or, The Jig is Up!)....................................................................... 77
AFTERMATH............................................................................................................... 78
pl
Appendices
Appendix 1: La Perfide Angleterre......................................................................... 80
m

Appendix 2: The Grand Châtelet........................................................................... 82

Appendix 3: Musketeers.......................................................................................... 87
Appendix 4: Comment t’appelles-tu?................................................................... 89
Sa

Wrting, Art, and Cartography: Kelvin Green

Layout and Design: Alex Mayo
Editing: Tom Cadorette

3
A sliver of pretentious
game fiction like what we
had in the Nineties
One day, many years ago, James Raggi
emerged from a brimstone portal and,
as a thousand tortured angels wailed in
unison, the Great Beast of Role-Playing
opened the maw that had devoured a
million worlds. “Write me a book with
a title that makes the acronym TITS,” he
intoned, every syllable like the pounding
of a risen corpse against the inside of a
basalt coffin, “It will make me laugh when
I look at my accounts.”
“Uh, okay,” I said, as infernal flames
lashed out, burning my eyebrows to ash.
Satisfied with my answer, the Dread Lord
e Anyway. The point is, the idea is that I’ve
returned to the eighty-seventh layer of
Heck and continued the eternal task of
castigating the souls of the unworthy.
pl
I went away and wrote a dreadful
high-concept yet embarrassing-
ly-on-the-nose thing about what happens
when the lights go out ((c) Five, 1998),
m
which was rejected, probably for the best.
Then the Dark Overlord returned and
asked for “Jack the Ripper, but 250 years
early” and so here we are.
Sa
A Note on Rewards
As written, this adventure does not offer much
in the way of experience or loot, but there
are plenty of opportunities to make powerful
friends and gain influence; see Aftermath
(page 78 for more on that). It’s a quite deliber-
ate part of the design process, and indeed was
part of the original brief, so that’s why we have
done it this way.
4
How to run this garbled
mess adventure
Terror in the Streets is a hunt for a serial
killer in Paris, during the year 1630. There
is no direct path from A to B to C, but
there is a timeline of expected events,
some locations, and a few clues. Perhaps
your players will find lots of clues, make
e
lots of clever connections, and find the
killer on the second day. Maybe they
will get distracted by some minor detail,
and the killer will escape. They might
fil
even cock up massively and get burned
at the stake as Cardinal Richelieu looks
on, smiling over steepled fingers, one
eyebrow raised as he…
presented you with a sequence of events
and a bunch of clues to throw at your
players, and it is up to them to sort it out
and solve the mystery. As such, it is well
worth reading through the book in some
detail before running it; I know every
adventure ever written says that, but you
will have to run a lot of things on the fly
as you play this one, so it’s worth doing.
I have tried to present things in a practi-
cal and sensible order to make running
the adventure as easy as possible, and,
although the mystery itself is relatively
simple, there are a lot of moving parts to
bear in mind.
Some players of old-school role-playing
games expect monsters and treasure in
their adventures, and the relative absence
of both in this one may be a problem, so I
thought it best to acknowledge it upfront.
To handle the investigation, I suggest
splitting the game day into four-hour
chunks and allow the players to follow
one lead per chunk. I’m not saying it will take four hours
to go and ask the parents of Julien Pascal (page 42) what
happened to their son—although I suppose it depends
on how dense your players are—and I admit the four-
hour thing is a contrivance of convenience rather than
accuracy. It takes into account preparation, delays along
the way (page 26), getting lost—Paris in 1630 had no
street signs and house numbers were disorganised and
rare—and so on.

e
The four-hour-chunking is arbitrary, but it helps
structure the investigation. I have run Call of

fil
Cthulhu (TM) adventures using the format
since 1996 and it’s worked well.

There’s no requirement that all the char-

acters stick together in one blob as they
go about their business. This is one
case where it may be more sensible to
split the party so more clues can be
gathered more quickly. After
all, they are trying to solve the
e
pl
mystery before more children
go missing.
m
Sa

5

CSI: Paris 1630
We have been conditioned by over a cen-
tury of detective fiction and true crime
documentaries to understand how the
gathering of clues works. We know about
a blood types, fingerprints, DNA, and all
of that good stuff, and we are familiar
enough with the concepts that it could be
difficult to put ourselves in the mindset of
seventeenth-century investigators.
Of course, no one in 1630 had access to
DNA databases, but it’s not just about
technology—it’s also about knowhow.
The unique nature of fingerprints, for
example, was known in the ancient world,
and was used for identification by the
Babylonians and Chinese, among others,
e
but no one, in Europe at least, thought to
use them for criminal investigation until
the nineteenth-century. Even something
pl
that seems obvious to us, like checking
an alibi, was not a common investigative
procedure until after the 1750s. Many
modern criminal investigation techniques
were technically possible in 1630, but the
m
concepts just had not occurred to anyone.
The primacy of evidence is also a modern
invention. Trials in 1630 are often less
about evidence and more about testi-
Sa
mony, and not necessarily eyewitness
testimony. You could be convicted or
acquitted on the basis of character, class,
nationality, religion, or whoever your dad
was. This seems ridiculous to our modern
eyes—or not; satire! —but it is the way
things tend to work in the seventeenth
century.
How you want to handle this role-playing
challenge is up to you. My suggestion
would be to talk to your players and
6
explain that their characters would not
know about this sort of thing, so they
should try to avoid thinking in such
terms. But if you’re happy with them
inventing modern forensic techniques
centuries early, that’s fine. It’s your game.
All that said, one special resource charac-
ters in LotFP’s 1630 have that we do not,
e
even today, is magic.
(Well, I don’t have access to magic. Alan
fil
Moore says he’s a wizard, and I probably
believe him, but I doubt he’s reading this.
If he is, then crikey! Hullo, Alan!)
Magic rituals and spells could ruin the
investigation if not handled well, so it is
a good idea to have a look at the spells
available to your players and think about
how they could interact with the adven-
ture. You don’t want to be unfair about
things, but you also don’t want a spell
to torpedo the entire adventure because
that’s no fun for anyone. So Speak With
Animals just unlocks a witness, one that
may be no more reliable than a human.
Commune will probably be more useful,
but it depends on the questions asked. Be
tight, but don’t be a bastard.
A note on historical
Accuracy
Believe it or not, I have, in fact, done
some research! Where possible, I have
presented seventeenth-century Paris as it
was, or at least a playable facsimile there-
of. The Demon Tailor and his crimes are
real, but occurred sometime in the late
1500s, and he was caught and executed in
December 1598. He was not, as far as we
are aware, related to Cardinal Richelieu.
Jean Grenier was also real, but he was
active about thirty years earlier than the
setting of the adventure. The Court of
Miracles was real—although I have made
up some details—as is the thing about the
checkpoints between districts.
On that subject, before the French Revo-
lution, Paris was divided into a series of
districts, but sources differ on how many
areas there were and what their boundar-
ies were, so I’ve more or less made them
up. Paris had taxis from 1612, 1637, 1640,
or 1645 depending on who you ask; I’ve
included them because they were in the
playtest version of the adventure, and I
liked them too much to take out. I hope
that potential inconsistency won’t bother
too many people. The French franc was
a silver coin in 1630, so I have equated it
to the LotFP silver piece for convenience,
e no dog nerds start flaming LotFP HQ over a
and I know that’s also not quite right and
je suis désolé.
pl
Oh, and all the handouts are in English
because the book is in English. I under-
stand that this less harms verisimilitude
and more takes it into a dark alley and
breaks its legs, but I only got a C in GCSE
m
French twenty-plus years ago, and there’s
only so much I can do.
Sa
7
Ain’t Nothin’
Dogs, and bloodhounds in particular, are
excellent tools for investigation. Bloodhounds
can acquire a scent from an object that has
been touched by the quarry, even something
a
like a footprint, and can track that scent for
hours, even days after the contact was made,
e
and over great distances.
As it happens, bloodhounds are probably
French in origin, which is a nice coincidence,
fil
although they were never popular in France—
too English, probably—until after they had
died out in the nineteenth century, at which
point English bloodhounds were imported to
resurrect the breed. For game purposes, we
will assume they are the same and hope that
minor historical point.
Given the bloodhound’s special skills and
relative rarity—several pairs were given as gifts
to the French royal family each year—let’s say
that a trained animal costs ten times the price
of a normal dog, so 10sp in the city, and 20sp
in the countryside, plus food. Bastard Referees
may also want to insist that the dog requires a
trained handler; treat this as the animal han-
dler on Rules & Magic, pages 47-48.
BLOODHOUND, snoopin’ ‘round your
door: Armour 14, Move 150’, 1 Hit Dice,
6hp, bite 1d4, Morale 8. Bloodhounds
acquire and follow a scent on a 1d6 roll of
4+. Roll again each time something happens
that might confuse or disrupt the trail, such
as crossing a body of water.
 The Demon Tailor and
the Grand Plan
The Demon Tailor is Claude Marchand,
the illegitimate older half-brother of Car-
dinal Richelieu (page 10), a connection
a and there was no chance of an earthquake
that should cause complications later in
the adventure, and complications mean
prizes! Or something.
As a boy, Claude apprenticed with a
butcher before training to become a tailor.
He is quite successful and talented in the
latter profession and has earned a number
of high-profile commissions—including
making the distinctive blue uniforms for
the royal house (page 65)—without any
intervention from his powerful brother.
e (page 38). Once all eight are dead, the
Claude and Richelieu have very little con-
tact; the Cardinal will sometimes meet
with his brother in secret when the tailor
pl
has business at the royal palace, and he
has signed a document that allows Claude
free passage through the city’s check-
points (page 64). Their relationship is
not well known. Despite having different
m
mothers, they look enough alike so as to
confuse some people (page 41).
Claude believes he has had a message
from God. He believes that eleven days
Sa
after the start of the adventure, an earth-
quake will destroy much of Paris, killing
thousands. The only way to prevent this
cataclysm is to kill the eight demons that
hide in the forms of young people.
8
There Is No God
As written, Claude is suffering a temporary
delusion, there was no message from God,
devastating Paris, but there is nothing prevent-
ing you from deciding that he is operating ac-
cording to the instructions of a higher power
e
calling itself “God,” and that disruption of the
Plan will indeed bring disaster to the city. See
Catastrophe! (page 78).
fil
At the start of the adventure, Claude has
killed four of the eight and will select and
kill the remainder over the next few days
tailor will wait a couple of days and, con-
tent that the earthquake has been averted,
disappear into history.
All that said, Julien Pascal (page 42) was
destined to be an Apocalypse Child, but
Marchand doesn’t know that, nor does
“God.”
Claude tortures his victims by flaying
them alive. After they have died of blood
loss or shock, he then cooks and eats their
flesh so that he can consume their “light,”
then uses their skin to construct a suit
with which he can commune with God.
The tailor believes the suits make him
invincible, and has made two of them as
the adventure begins.
The bones of Marchand’s victims are
sealed in barrels and stored in his court-
yard. Well, one barrel goes a bit missing,
as we see on page 56.
CLAUDE MARCHAND, the Demon
Tailor: Armour 12 (none) or 16 (boost-
ed skinsuit), Move 120’, 0 Level Tailor,
4hp, razor-sharp scissors 1d4, Morale
12.
Blue cloak; good quality but plain
clothing; satchel containing a letter of
a
passage signed and sealed by Richelieu,
a ring of keys, scissors, 6sp and 80cp;

e
skinsuit (worn under clothes).
Playing the Demon Tailor: You are
an intelligent and dedicated man, and

fil
you have made a good living, but you’ll
never be as successful as your brother.
You have an opportunity to do a great
thing and save the world, but to do so
you have to commit terrible crimes.
You are trying to balance all this but
have ended up tearing yourself to piec-

when you are talking about the Great

Work, when you become agitated but
e
es. You are distracted and distant except
The Skinsuits
The adventure assumes that there are no
pl
focused, but always there is the sense supernatural elements involved in the tailor’s
that you are not quite good enough. activities, but if you want to throw a nasty
magic item at the players, read on.
Speak quickly, ramble, ask vague ques-
tions that seem to have no relevance A skinsuit acts like leather armour because
to the subject at hand. Call yourself it sort of is. It exudes an aura of disgust and
m

“bad” or “stupid” and slap your head
or the table, then switch to a calm and
firm voice when you are focused on the
Grand Plan.
Sa
terror that forces normal human opponents
to make a Morale test at the beginning of
combat; those that fail recoil for a Round and
those that fail on a double flee. There is a 3%
chance per day at midnight of a vision sent

from an entity portraying itself as “God.” This

being encourages the wearer of the suit to kill
and skin humans; in return, it will increase the
Armour of the suit to 16 for a week following
the sacrifice. The number of humans needed
to be killed to gain the bonus increases by one
each time; the first time it will be one victim,
the next two, and so on.