Henry VIII enraged the Church of Rome and made himself an enemy of Catholicism. But worse, that collapse in solidarity of faith combined with the fanaticism that followed on all sides to root out unbelievers assaulted the strength of belief across Europe. That shift weakened the invisible barrier between worlds.

Opportunity knocked for supernatural entities and practitioners of magick to recover from centuries of passive resistance generated by a wall of blind faith. The mortal population had no way to know of the repercussions, seeing the resurgence of the bugs and Fae as a result of witchcraft, rather than the result of fading tradition.

In 1563, the Queen passed an Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts. It muddied the water a bit, making the punishment for particular acts of magic more severe than others, but in many cases drawing the line before a death sentence.

In 1564, John Dee and Francis Walsingham convinced the Queen to pass an amendment to the Act — The Dee Sanction — that permitted the practice of magic in defence of the realm. It supported the potential for those who used their heretical knowledge to work off their sentence in service to Her Majesty. That capacity for reprieve fell within the jurisdiction of Walsingham and Dee. They controlled those fortunate malefactors as Agents, bound to a covert intelligence service.

Throughout the decades that followed — despite both Dee and Walsingham’s apparent rollercoaster ride in and out of favour — this potential for absolution persists. The focus and mission might shift and change, but the goal remains; use magic for the good of the Queen, and you might earn your freedom.

You’re an Agent of Dee; not out of choice, but out of some twisted sense of self-preservation. Somewhere between conscription and penance, you work for Walsingham and Dee to make amends. You have a faint hope that you can use your talents to earn your pardon and absolution.

Those around you know something of your background. You’re not a good person. You have done bad things and been exposed to awful truths. But, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. If only you can outrun the shadows of your past and the horrors of the present…

This is The Dee Sanction.

The division of London runs beyond the confines of this map, but here’s the focus of many adventures I’ve run to date. It seems a sensible spot to write more about – in a separate supplement and featuring fixed details and random tables aplenty. A few of those fixed points will be shops, traders and key personalities on streets and alleyways north and south of the river – and herein lies the opportunity for early supporters.

At Dragonmeet, I will have a poster map of the area – and you can lay claim to one of the twenty available enterprises with a name and an email address. You Claim Your Plot for £10 on the day – and I’ll give you a flyer with the map and a note of your claimed business.

When the core rules release in print, I will send you a signed copy. The business itself may appear in adventures, if they’re released before Ossulstone Hundred, or else they’ll make their first appearance in the supplement.

The email address will allow me to keep in touch and get your mailing address when it comes time to send you your copy of the core rules. I plan to have the core out Q1 2020, with the Ossulstone supplement coming at some point later – I don’t want to confirm anything this early in the development!

If all the businesses aren’t taken by the end of Dragonmeet, I’ll open up to the wider world – though there will need to be an adjustment in the claim to cover international shipping should someone make a claim from outside the UK. 

More information to follow on the game and supplement – but, I hope to see some willing entrepreneurs of Elizabethan London at Dragonmeet next week.

And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.

[ Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī ]

Power and objects walk hand in hand. For some, the power imbued within an object arose from association. The very contact that an item had with an individual of significance left a residue or some echo of their soul. Like the bonding of a witch with a familiar or the harmony sought between a gambler and their favourite dice, possession would infuse an object with a preternatural quality accessible to others. If you could find something worn by a saint, then you could leverage the power that the saint exhibited in life. Or at least some aspect of it.

Conversely, the very drive and purpose of the seeker might have something to do with the influence of the object. The sinner who seeks to make use of a holy relic will likely find the task fruitless, whereas the faithful will experience something quite different. In some ways, the power might seem to no longer lie with the object in that case, but that the object serves as a test of focus and resolve, a mirror to the soul of those who would seek to use it. Therein the words of Rumi echo, for in presenting objects of desire we are tested – and in that test we find those worthy and those solely seeking to better themselves at a loss to others.

Doctor Dee on the other hand seems to have seen something altogether different in the power of objects. Relics and items of power neither possessed the power themselves nor served as key to the lock of personal potential. Instead, Dee perceived objects as conduits, a means to harness the vibrations or reflected power that permeated the many layers of reality – surging forth through the supernaturall via the application of the intellectuall to manifest in the physicall, the lowest state of all.

In The Dee Sanction, this reflected puissance manifests both in the Tradecraft of Magic, where characters may use objects to further their ends against powerful entities of the supernatural, or they may seek to harness some fragment of an artefacts potential, rather like a grail – unworthy of the greater power of an object but able to channel some minor fragment. The Black Seal of Doctor Dee, for example, serves as a major artefact, one which the player driven Agents will only rarely use themselves and then only as a means to ward fixed areas against ingress and egress. Mirrors of a certain quality, too, will serve as a medium for communication through the divine ether, like telegrams carried on the words of archangels.

Mechanically, using an object with Tradecraft will strike that from the scarce major tool kit the characters have to draw upon as a group; whereas, the application of fragmentary powers will require attunement of some form, specific to the object, and the Challenging a Resource fitting to the task (and set by the Gamemaster). The cost of the Challenge will inevitably drain the Resource, but the specific format (and explanation) of the object may carry with it specifics (in the form of simple Tags) as to the repercussions of failure. Indeed, many artefacts and objects of significance will have keyed random collections of unfortunate side effects and consequences that arise from ill-guided misuse. Agents beware the frivolous handling of potent curios.

When you go to see a film at the cinema, you accept that the studio, writer, director and other associated parties have played their part in confirming the verisimilitude of their film’s historical context and backdrop. No one expect you to turn up having completed required reading – but, in turn, the film makers do not necessarily expect you to nit-pick if they don’t try too hard. Your suspension of disbelief, to a greater or lesser extent, extends to allowing the studio, writer, etc. some measure of creative freedom. Unless you’ve turned up expecting to see some original Shakespeare, for example, you’ll forgive the film for not having all the characters speaking in some quasi-English dialect. When you see the hovels and filth laden streets of outer London, you’ll accept that this could very well be an image of the actual place – despite almost certainly not being a true representation.

In consideration of this, and in giving thought to pushing further forward with the writing of The Dee Sanction, it has occurred to me that the key aspects of history relevant to the game should only deal with the aspects that matter and a notion of the window dressing.

I saw someone post about Maelstrom noting that when they read about the game the mere mention of historical put them off – and I get behind that to some extent. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate historical game – absolutely not. I’m saying that I understand why a reference to “historical” might put someone off with the suggestion that the game requires foreknowledge to appreciate or enjoy. When I recently ran a game of Star Trek Adventures, I specifically noted that participation in the one-shot convention game did not require any detailed knowledge about the series or movies whatsoever. Yes, you could do with getting what Star Trek is – but, that’s in the same way that if you see a cobbled and filthy London street with carts, horses and pedestrians squeezing between lines of tall and leaning houses with black timber supports and off-white panels, punctured with tiny, dark windows, then you can probably take a guess at “Tudor” and maybe “Elizabethan”.

Flavour matters where writing The Dee Sanction; getting across to the GM and potential players what makes the game different. I struggle to read any RPG core book that expects you to pile through 100+ pages of densely packed text on history and background before you get to what the game will really be about. In the same way, I need to show you a filthy cobbled street with dirt-smeared pedestrians and precarious buildings, but I shouldn’t serve up 100 pages on the economic and political history of the Elizabethan regime during the last quarter of the 16th century. You need to know about Elizabeth’s spy network, her relationship with Walsingham and Dee, and the forces of the arcane the Doctor believes to exist encapsulated in the study of angels and their movements.

And perhaps it’s worrying about just how much you need to know that has slowed the progress of The Dee Sanction reaching print?

Now, knowing what I want to convey (and what I can leave to the audience) might well contribute to a pace of progression that will see the core book out by early 2018. Perhaps.

I’m having an interesting time reading about John Dee and his role as an intelligencer within the court of Queen Elizabeth, referenced in the early sections of The Essential Enochian Grimoire: An Introduction to Angel Magick from Dr John Dee to the Golden Dawn. While I was mainly looking for more information about Dee’s exploits with Enochian lore, his mysteries don’t start with his pursuits of the supernatural. Even before Francis Walsingham stepped up to the plate as Elizabeth’s spymaster, it seems Dee may have been running secretive errands for the Queen.

For the setting of The Dee Sanction, it’s assumed very much that Dee and Walsingham are partners in their intelligence activities. One deals with the mundane, while the other handles those threats less easily quantified.

Dee provided assistance and advice to the young Elizabeth from long before her coronation; only later did his effort become, by any measure, public knowledge. In appending the Dee Sanction to the 1563 Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts, Elizabeth gave her backing to an official agency in the fight versus dark powers. Whether powers in pursuit of their own ends or in league with the likes of the Holy Cee or the King of Spain, they all come within the remit of Dee and his agents.

In reality, it’s hard to see what actually was happening. Dee did serve Elizabeth in some intelligence-based capacity; however, the available information, scattered across diaries, journals, once hidden papers and other more official sources, provides but a fragmentary view. When Dee took to his travels across Europe with Edward Kelley, actual information on the purpose of the said journey remains vague.

In the face of considerable opposition, from Catholics and others, the Queen had every need to seek support, from both political allies and higher powers. The Dee Sanction follows the exploits of the player characters as agents of Dee, whether in 1570s England or deep in Eastern Europe during his travels in the 80s. Whether on the word of Dee, Kelley, Walsingham, or the Queen herself, the characters plumb the shadows for artefacts, hidden lore, and potential allies.

As if to create additional layers of uncertainty, Dee diaries contain several specific references to individuals by the name of Garland. At least four named persons have this same name and the fact they do not appear in any corroborating record suggests Dee used the term as an alias for fellow agents, couriers, or supernatural contacts. Walsingham used a variety of travellers and personalities himself, including writers, poets, diplomats, and merchants. All intelligence was good intelligence in the war against the Catholics – and undoubtedly Francis had a network scattered across Europe, gathering information, carrying messages, and spreading unrest from within.

Whether Garland was a codename isn’t clear – but, it could be. The use of Garland could be a specific code for a type of agent, or a reference Dee alone used to identify his own allies or contacts. In some references, it seems like the Garlands might be brothers – which made me think of the Koenig Brothers from Agents of SHIELD TV series. However, all weight of evidence suggests that the name signifies something other than familial kinship. I certainly intend to add a Garland to the available character options for The Dee Sanction.

Delivering a garland to someone clearly involved something more than just rocking up with a pretty arrangement of flowers for someone.