Adrien de Montferrand
Investigator Skills ○ tick on a successful roll · coloured value = above base · all skills shown, untouched at base
Weapons
| Weapon | Skill% | Damage | Atk | Range | Ammo | Malf |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brawl | 35 | 1D3+1D4 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Cavalry Sabre | 26 | 1D8+1D4 | 1 | – | – | – |
| Rapier / heavy épée | 26 | 1D6+1+1D4 | 1 | Touch | – | – |
| Flintlock Pistol (2B) | 40 | 1D6+1 | 1/4 | 10 yds | 2 | 90 |
| Hunting Rifle | 25 | 1D10+2 | 1 | 90 yds | 1 | 95 |
| Knife | 35 | 1D4+1D4 | 1 | – | – | – |
Background
Personal Description: Tall (6’1") and athletic, sun-darkened and rough-handed from years outdoors. Dark blond hair, striking blue-gray eyes, a thin scar across the left jaw. He dresses for the field, not the ballroom, in a deep green coat and riding boots, and the military poise has exhaustion under it.
Traits: Charming but quietly haunted. Speaks plainly and softly, often wry, and reads the people around him for trembling hands and false smiles. Always half-ready to move. Keeps a notebook full of bones, insects, and ruins.
Ideology & Beliefs: Believes in forces and patterns rather than God. He is driven to spare others the horror he found in the Pyrenees, and to protect the innocent, above all those whose minds are already scarred.
Significant People:
- Caroline Hartley – romantic interest, chosen openly at the Masquerade. Was a Brotherhood reserve target inside the University; recovered at the end of the Vienna assault (Session 14). Thread closed since Chapter 4, Session 1 – see Current Status.
- Comte Emeric de Puyrault – old friend who introduced him to the investigators in Lyon
- Marina Garrick – his emotional and intellectual mirror; killed in Lyon. Their connection was built on the recognition of shared scars.
- Lord Percival Harcourt – Order commander who recruited him
Meaningful Locations:
- Le Coteau des Ombres – His family hunting lodge north of Lyon, a converted Roman watchtower overlooking the Rhone valley. Contains the Montferrand Collection.
- Palais Kinsky – His Vienna residence; site of the Nightgaunt battle. Charlotte still convalesces there.
- The Pyrenees Abbey – where his patrol encountered something “older than God” and only he and one other man returned.
Treasured Possessions:
- His field notebook – sketches of bones, insects, ruins, and observations from years of travel
- The Resonance Compass – his experimental harmonic detection device
- Aelfric Cravat Pin – symbol of his Order initiation (received Session 5)
Injuries & Scars
- Chapter 2 – Orphans’ Hospital: Wounded during the Blue Sash reinforcement assault at the rear of the hospital. Recovered before the road to Vienna.
- Session 9 – Masquerade Fall: Fell from a broken window at Palais Lobkowitz during the escape; caught and cushioned by Varrio on the port-cochere below. No lasting injury.
Phobias & Manias
Phobia — Meat (Session 13): Developed after watching Varrio cut open the Wächter at the safehouse and seeing human viscera spill across the table. The creature’s human-origin organs — recognisable, wet, and wrong — were the sight that broke something in Adrien’s clinical distance. The phobia is new and its precise triggers (raw meat, butchery, surgical openings) remain to be established in play.
Encounters with Strange Entities
- The Pyrenees Abbey (pre-campaign): During the campaigns against Spanish guerillas, Adrien’s patrol discovered an abandoned abbey where the monks had worshiped something “older than God.” Only he and one other man returned. The rest of the patrol vanished into the mountain mist, their screams echoing for hours. This is the foundational trauma of his life and the source of his Cthulhu Mythos knowledge.
- The Formless Spawn (Chapter 2 – Lyon): Present at the Goupil masquerade where the party witnessed a Formless Spawn ritual and child sacrifice at the Maison du Corbeau.
- The Nightgaunt (Session 6): The creature crawled down the exterior of Palais Kinsky, shattered Charlotte’s window, and attacked the party. Adrien delivered the killing blow, driving his sword through the faceless entity and pinning it to the wall. It dissolved into black goo.
- Harmonische Wächter (Session 8-9): Three Wächter deployed at the Palais Lobkowitz Masquerade via Adler’s command tuning fork. Bronze-scaled, almost-human creatures – the failed integration subjects of the Engine. Two were killed by fire (Varrio); one was controlled briefly by Georgiana through the fork and then burned.
Arcane Tomes & Spells
None. Cthulhu Mythos 04% derives from the Pyrenees incident, not from study.
Fellow Investigators
- Emma Wentworth – companion since Lyon
- Georgiana Wentworth – companion since Lyon
- Freddy Cavendish – joined in Vienna (Session 6)
- Katherine Ward – Order operative, joined in Vienna (Session 7)
- Varrio Harrowmont – companion since the road to Vienna
Current Status
The Magistrate of Calcutta spent the evening speaking French to him, offered him the Chandernagore repatriation, and recommended he lodge with the man they came to stop.
Location: At table, Garden Reach, Calcutta, evening of 9 October 1814 (Chapter 4, Session 9) — the dinner is unfinished Condition: Physically uninjured; Sanity 48. Meat phobia (Session 13) remains live and its triggers still undefined — now four times untested by things that should have set it off Carrying: Resonance Compass; Aelfric Cravat Pin; field notebook and sketches; cavalry sabre; flintlock pistol; travelling kit Open threads:
- Charles Ashworth has invited him to assist with the Chandernagore repatriation and to break the journey at Baranagar with his personal friend Devendra Ghosh. He holds an unimpeachable social reason to walk into the enemy’s house as a guest. Unanswered
- Ashworth is a Francophile and treats him as a welcome countryman of the mind. The warmth is genuine and makes the man harder, not easier, to work
- Elizabeth Ashby has asked him to chaperone her home to her family in the Indian quarter. Agreed in principle, no day set. See Sutanuti
- He was named from the chancel as a Frenchman to the whole of Calcutta society, in a British war establishment. See Standing Situations for the one-remark-per-social-room rule
- Calcutta groundwork — Harcourt’s military-liaison letters, Fort William access, the mess introduction to Lt Hatcherly of the Bengal Engineers, the demolitions role earmarked for the counter-ritual — still not begun, and now stale six sessions, with the Anglo Nepalese War eating the resource base from 1 November
- The Caroline thread is closed Knows (exclusive): The Montferrand Collection and his Pyrenean research on “harmonic theophany” — precursor material to the Canticle. Also the whole of Ashby’s history, told to him first, and Ashworth’s personal regard for Ghosh, offered to him directly.
On the Suez crossing (Chapter 4, Session 6) Adrien was the party’s crisis hand: repeatedly thrown by an animal that made no sense to a horseman, but steady through the sandstorm scramble and the courtyard chaos, and the one who examined Hewitt’s body and confirmed the strangulation. Prodding the corpse for more, he pressed its distended belly hard enough to make it belch and sit bolt upright. His meat phobia did not fire on the body. The party now travels on with the confessed killer Elizabeth Ashby in company.
Riding out of Cairo before dawn on 20 September 1814 onto the Suez caravan road, having crossed from Alexandria via Rosetta and the Nile aboard a hired dahabiya and spent four days over Eid al-Fitr at the Auberge du Muski (Chapter 4, Session 5). Physically uninjured through the becalming and the Egypt overland leg. In Cairo (Session 5) he and Katherine booked the party’s passage with Krikor Bedrossian — seven places on a caravan to Suez departing the 20th under Hassan al-Rashidi, other Europeans travelling with them, water to be brought by the party. And he sat late with the homesick French innkeeper Bruyère in his salon, trading everything he knew of France for glass after glass of brandy until he stumbled out drunk — one exile pouring a lost country back into another across a table in Egypt.
The Caroline situation is closed. She was recovered from the University and the theatre at the end of the Vienna assault (Session 14); Adrien carried her out himself and delivered her to the Hartleys at Palais Kinsky. When Mrs Hartley called him Caroline’s “betrothed,” he withdrew from the family entirely and never said goodbye — he heard her singing, scarred but intact, from elsewhere in the hotel before the party left Vienna (Chapter 4, Session 1), and has had no contact with her or the Hartleys since. She is no longer inside the University and no longer a Brotherhood target; the thread requires no further tracking.
During the becalming aboard La Speranza (Sessions 2-3), Adrien brokered the crew’s response to the crisis: he secured the cabin key from Captain Zanier and negotiated the rope tether before the crew threw Endicott overboard as a sacrifice, then spent the following day working the frightened crew with rum and patience. When the dead climbed the hull on the second night, he held the defensive line at the rail while Katherine broke and fled below and Georgiana alone carried the funeral rite to its end.
In Alexandria (Session 3) he formed a connection with Capitaine Thibault, a retired French officer of the Armée d’Orient, whose advice on the Rosetta river route shaped the passage to Cairo, and drew a line of credit through the French merchant house Maison Roux on Thibault’s introduction. In Alexandria’s victualing market (Session 4, corrected – previously misdated to Cairo), a one-eyed veteran called Mansour fell into parade step beside Adrien, loudly demanding back pay for a donkey he claimed Napoleon owed him – Adrien paid him off with a large coin to be rid of him.
His Calcutta-specific groundwork — Harcourt’s letters of military liaison, access to Fort William, the mess-dinner introduction to Lieutenant Hatcherly of the Bengal Engineers, and the demolitions role earmarked for the eventual counter-ritual assault — has not yet begun. The party has not yet reached India.
Connections to Other Files
- Emeric de Puyrault – His old friend who introduced him to the investigators in Lyon
- Marina Garrick – His emotional and intellectual mirror (Chapter 2)
- Caroline Hartley – Romantic interest (Session 3 onward); was a Brotherhood reserve target (Session 9), recovered and thread closed (Session 14 / Chapter 4, Session 1)
- Palais Kinsky – His Vienna residence
- Le Coteau des Ombres – His family hunting lodge north of Lyon
- Montferrand Collection – His private research archive
- Order of St Aelfric – His current affiliation (recruited Session 5)
- Aelfric Cravat Pin – Order identification, symbol of initiation
- Lord Percival Harcourt – His Order commander
- Campaign Overview Updated – The broader campaign structure
- Charles Duval – His French coachman
- Francois Barbier – His second French coachman
- Thaliastrasse 12 Safehouse – Current safehouse (Session 9 onward)
Notes
{Player-facing notes. Protected – skills never modify.}
Tactical Support
- As a Bourbon noble with local estate ties, Adrien can secure legal access papers or nighttime permissions (hunting licenses, carriage passes) giving the party plausible reason to move through restricted districts after curfew
- His estate guards and stablehands can act as temporary NPC allies or distractions during operations
- During confrontations, he has personally contributed armed combat and tactical initiative
- Coachmen Charles and Francois serve as active field support
Gear & Possessions
- Hunting rifle
- Cavalry sabre
- Knife
- Field notebook (sketches, observations, research notes)
- Resonance Compass – experimental harmonic detection device (see below)
- Aelfric Cravat Pin – Order of St. Aelfric identification
- Deep green coat, cream waistcoat, riding boots
- Acts as a tracking device for the Brotherhood’s rehearsals or rituals
- Within 200 yards of an active harmonic source, it begins to tremble audibly
- At an active ritual site, the oscillations grow violent – confirming the cult’s location
- Can react to the ritual itself, serving as a dramatic tension gauge (the needle thrashing wildly as the Canticle begins)
- Transcribed Pyrenean monastic codices about “harmonic theophany” – precursors to the Canticle
- A weathered map of France annotated with acoustic ley-lines (drawn by an 18th-century Jesuit musicologist). Lyon sits at one of the “Resonant Nodes.”
- Several volumes from the Abbey of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, whose monks studied “voices in stone”
- A locked cabinet containing sketches of geometrical resonators and a fragment of Roman bronze marked with the same interlocked-rings motif found on Mathilde Savarin’s cult insignia
- Fragments of a broken harmonic lyre, clearly from the same Roman cult the Societe Harmonique emulates
- A bronze key engraved with the same three-ring motif used by the Blue Sash cultists
- A journal from a 2nd-century Roman engineer, translated poorly by Adrien, describing “the Voice Beneath the Earth” – a precursor myth to the Canticle
Wealth
| Spending Level | Upper class |
| Cash | ~3,000 gulden (letter of credit, Session 1) |
| Assets | Montferrand estate and hunting lodge (Le Coteau des Ombres) |