Adrien de Montferrand

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)

• 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.

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.

• 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.

None. Cthulhu Mythos 04% derives from the Pyrenees incident, not from study.

• 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

He told a furious Meg Cavendish to calm down beside her wrecked carriage, then took the boat upriver with Elizabeth and steered it round the pale water below Baranagar.

Location: The Dak Bungalow on the Chitpur Road at Baranagar, the night of Thursday 13 October 1814, after fleeing Ghosh’s house (Chapter 4, Session 15) Condition: Bruises from the steeplechase faded; meat phobia (since Session 13) remains live, untested this session Carrying: Resonance Compass; Aelfric Cravat Pin; sketchbook and pencils (gift from Elizabeth); field notebook and sketches; cavalry sabre; flintlock pistol; travelling kit Open threads:

• The cylinder from the Zorab sale holds a dead man. At Thursday’s breakfast every fitting was seated and the brain gave no response at all; Meg put it plainly: there was a person in it, and the person is dead. It stays at the Cavendish Compound with Freddy and Katherine while the others go upriver. One Mi-Go escaped on Wednesday night, and the creatures got the instrument case
• Dr Venn was left drugged in his own study with his notes scattered round him, and the Zorabs have been told he is to blame for Gregor’s state
• Gregor Zorab asked him at the sale whether a man may honourably give his life for a kinsman, heard him answer yes, thanked him, and went and put the needle crown on his own head. Gregor is now catatonic
• The Sutanuti homecoming is played. He escorted Elizabeth with Pratap translating; her mother relented, her sister and uncle did not warm. The boats were never asked for — the climax-relevant river access through Nikhil and Malati is still open
• The marriage question keeps advancing without either of them naming it — Anna’s to develop further
• Elizabeth came upriver with him on Thursday, translating for the boatmen, and beat him at whist after losing at piquet. Her offer to guide him to Chandernagore is taken up. At the ball she handed him her dance card (“seen me at my worst, twice”) and they shared the floor again; Katherine declined his own request for a dance
• Renwick attended breakfast at the compound, saw the party’s scars and Georgiana’s changing hand, and committed to help. Freddy delivered Ashworth Letter to Blackwood to Colonel Blackwood on Thursday morning: Renwick is off the Nepal draft, and the mess dinner is moved to Monday 17 October
• The Fort William letters remain unlodged, and the mess dinner, now Monday 17 October, is where they would count
• Roy named an unidentified Havildar in his account of the missing — his mother performed his funeral rites, his pay stopped reaching home — without giving a name; nobody has connected it to anyone
• A pale sheet lay on the water in the last mile below Baranagar, and head-sized globes rose from it, shimmering like oil, each with the suggestion of a mouth, while a low note came up through the boat’s planks. Adrien calmed the boatmen and took the boat round by the western bank. One boatman began humming the same note and kept looking back at the water
• Meg holds the party responsible for the wrecked carriage and the danger to her house and her unborn child. He told her to calm down; she turned the full force of it on him
• Ashworth’s commission for Chandernagore (Ashworth Chandernagore Chit) remains; he delivered Ashworth Letter to Ghosh to Ghosh by hand on arrival. Whether the Friday trip still stands is open
• He confronted Kaunitz at dinner about his disappearance from the ball in Vienna
• Ghosh showed his hand at his own dinner table. He said his cult is in every rung of the government, the Company, the army and the judiciary, and that the ritual on the night of Kali opens a gate for Yog-Sothoth. His servants held the party in their chairs while four of them merged into Kaunitz and gave him back distorted and broken, Ghosh’s servant now. Ghosh showed his own arm, a tentacle with fronds from the elbow down, called the party not worth the trouble of killing, and left. The party fled to the Dak Bungalow
• Elizabeth was found staring at the middle of Ghosh’s table, white and shaking, and had to be guided out. Earlier she had shown the sisters her karambit knives and told them of her years on a quest for vengeance
• Two heavy thumps landed on the compound roof late on Thursday night, as Katherine’s palanquin came back through the gates. The cylinder is in Emma’s room in the West House Knows (exclusive): The Montferrand Collection and his Pyrenean research on “harmonic theophany”. The whole of Ashby’s history, and her family and her mother’s household firsthand. Ashworth’s personal regard for Ghosh, and the story of how it began. Roy’s account at Maniktala: Surlish’s 1811 suppression of the Gazette letter and his presence on the St John’s vestry and the Baranagar temple subscription list; the men who went to the temple for Ghosh’s blessing and came home changed before they stopped coming home at all, and the word samapti the priests gave their mothers; the boneless-arm drawing; thirty soldiers dead or missing since 1812, eleven dead (eight with cord marks), nineteen missing; the three troubling cases; the English officer who asked about the cord marks once and stopped. What the lens from Lot 14 shows when held to the eye: glowing winged forms, and a thread of light running across Calcutta.

After the Camberonne ball, Émeric took the investigators and Thomas to Adrien’s hunting lodge. Delaroche came there and laid out his terms to Gus: rescue his children from the hospital, and he would turn against Savarin. His appeal precipitated the hospital raid.

Thomas and Adrien were seriously wounded during the hospital assault, one shot and the other stabbed. Someone seized the remaining nurse in a surgical theatre near the veterans’ gunfight and compelled her to treat them.

• 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
• Charles Duval – His French coachman
• Francois Barbier – His second French coachman
• Thaliastrasse 12 Safehouse – Current safehouse (Session 9 onward)

{Player-facing notes. Protected – skills never modify.}