The Velvet Casefiles

“The victim was found in the champagne room with no pulse, no marks, and a smile that his wife says he has not worn since 1919. The coroner listed the cause of death as cardiac arrest. I listed it as a breach of spectral contract, third degree. We are both correct. Only one of us can file.”

• Case notes of Maren Cross, Velvet Bureau

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1. Setting Overview & Tone

Beaumont City glitters. Its nightclubs serve champagne to industrialists, its jazz halls produce music that makes the national papers, and its society pages document a social season that runs year-round. Underneath the glitter, the city’s occult economy is as organized as its legitimate one. Mediums hold office hours. Curse-brokers operate from rented storefronts. The dead attend parties when invited and occasionally when not.

The Velvet Bureau occupies a second-floor office above a hat shop on Garland Avenue. Its detectives take cases that involve supernatural elements: hauntings with contractual obligations, identity theft by doppelganger, assault by summoned entity, and the particular kind of fraud that involves selling a client’s future to a third party without disclosure.

Tone: Glamorous, cynical, and darkly funny. The setting treats the supernatural with the same procedural matter-of-factness that a noir detective treats organized crime. The horror is real but it follows rules, and the detectives’ job is to know the rules well enough to catch the people breaking them.

Sensory Pillars:

1. Sight: Beaumont City at night: neon signs reflected in wet pavement, women in beaded dresses crossing from one club to the next, the amber glow of a speakeasy through frosted glass. The supernatural layer: a ghost visible as a heat shimmer in a crowded room, ectoplasmic residue on a doorknob that glows faintly under the Bureau’s blacklight, a medium’s eyes rolling white during a genuine (rather than theatrical) channeling session.
2. Sound: Jazz from a dozen competing venues, each one bleeding into the street. The scratch of a gramophone playing a recording that contains a voice the original session did not capture. The particular silence in a room where something supernatural has just happened: not empty silence, but the silence of a space holding its breath.
3. Touch & Smell: Cigarette smoke layered over perfume layered over the sweet-sharp smell of gin. The cold spot in a warm room that indicates a spectral presence. The texture of a case file: cheap paper, typewriter ink, and occasionally a page that is warm to the touch because the evidence described on it is still active.

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2. The City

The Garland Avenue Office is the Bureau’s headquarters: two rooms above a hat shop, furnished with filing cabinets, a typewriter, a blacklight, and a locked cabinet containing materials the detectives would rather not explain to a landlord. The office smells like coffee and ozone. The filing system is organized by case type, not alphabet, because the Bureau handles more spectral contracts than any other category.

The Meridian Club is Beaumont’s most exclusive nightclub: a three-story establishment where the city’s wealthy drink, dance, and conduct business both legitimate and otherwise. The Club’s owner, Victor Laine, maintains a private room on the third floor where clients can hire mediums, curse-brokers, and other occult professionals. Laine considers himself a facilitator. The Bureau considers him a crime scene.

The Undercroft is the informal name for Beaumont’s occult market: a network of basement shops and back-alley offices where practitioners sell services that range from harmless fortune-telling to contract soul-binding. The Undercroft operates openly because the police have no category for its crimes. The Bureau does.

The Coroner’s Annex is a secondary morgue that the city coroner, Dr. Elise Mond, maintains for cases with supernatural elements. The Annex is technically a storage room. It contains three examination tables, a set of instruments that no medical school teaches, and a growing collection of evidence that Dr. Mond catalogs under the heading “unexplained cardiac events” because the official forms do not have a checkbox for “killed by ghost.”

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3. Factions

The Velvet Bureau investigates supernatural crimes. Its founder, Maren Cross, is a former police detective who left the force after filing a report that listed a ghost as a murder suspect. She was not wrong. She was unemployable. The Bureau operates on client fees, which means it serves whoever can pay, which means its client list includes both victims and perpetrators of the occult economy.

The Meridian Circle is Victor Laine’s network of occult professionals: mediums, curse-brokers, summoners, and contract specialists who operate from the Meridian Club. Laine does not practice himself. He takes a percentage. His network is efficient, discreet, and responsible for approximately half the cases the Bureau investigates. Laine considers this a healthy business ecosystem. Cross considers it organized crime with candles.

The City Rationalists are a political faction led by Alderman Pryce that wants to deny, suppress, and if possible eliminate the supernatural presence in Beaumont. Pryce does not believe in ghosts. Pryce has seen ghosts. Pryce has decided that public acknowledgment of ghosts would destroy property values, and he considers property values more important than accuracy.

The Dead Constituency is an informal term for the ghosts who remain in Beaumont. Most are harmless: deceased residents who attend their old haunts (literally) and cause no trouble. Some are victims of occult crimes who cannot move on until their cases are resolved. A few are dangerous. The Bureau treats them as witnesses, suspects, or clients depending on the case. The most reliable ghost contact is a former accountant named Harold Pace, who died in 1921 and now provides financial analysis for the Bureau in exchange for being treated like a person.

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4. Unique Mechanic: Evidence Chain

Build a chain of linked clues connecting a supernatural crime to its source.

Adding a link (+1):

• Verify a clue through investigation (Mind roll to analyze, Finesse to gather discreetly)
• Obtain testimony from a reliable witness (living or dead)
• Match physical evidence to a known occult practice
• Connect a suspect to the crime through documented motive or method

Weakening the chain (-1):

• Introduce a false clue that is later disproven
• Contaminate evidence through improper handling of supernatural materials
• Lose a witness (through intimidation, departure, or exorcism)
• Suspect successfully destroys or conceals evidence

Chain thresholds:

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5. Character Archetypes

The Bureau Detective

You investigate crimes that the police cannot file and the courts cannot process. You carry a notebook, a blacklight, and a revolver loaded with salt rounds (effective against spectral entities, useless against everything else). You are good at your job. You are also tired, underpaid, and aware that the next case might involve something your training did not cover.

• Drive: “Close the case before the evidence dissolves, the witness fades, or the client decides the truth is worse than the crime.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 3 | Mind 2 | Presence 2

The Reluctant Medium

You can communicate with the dead. This is professionally useful and personally exhausting. The Bureau hired you because your abilities are genuine in a city full of theatrical frauds. You spend your days interviewing murder victims and your evenings trying to remember which conversations were with living people.

• Drive: “Use what I can do to help the dead without becoming one of them.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 1 | Mind 3 | Presence 3

The Undercroft Informant

You work in the occult market and you sell information to the Bureau. Your day job is curse removal, which gives you access to the client lists and methods of every practitioner in the Undercroft. You walk a line between two worlds, and both sides suspect your loyalty. They are correct to suspect. You are loyal to whoever is paying and honest about it, which in Beaumont passes for integrity.

• Drive: “Stay useful to both sides long enough to figure out which one is going to win, then make sure I am standing on the right side of the line.”
• Approach Distribution: Force 1 | Finesse 2 | Mind 2 | Presence 3

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6. Starter Scenario & Why It Matters

The Champagne Room Case: A prominent industrialist is found dead in the Meridian Club’s private champagne room. No marks, no poison, no forced entry. He is smiling. His wife hired the Bureau because the coroner’s report says cardiac arrest and she says her husband has not smiled like that since before the war. Cross’s initial investigation reveals that the industrialist signed a spectral contract six months ago, trading “something precious” for guaranteed business success. The contract was brokered by someone in the Meridian Circle, but Laine claims ignorance. Harold Pace reviews the contract’s financial language and reports that the “something precious” clause is written in a dialect of spectral contract law that has not been used in fifty years, which means either the broker is very old or the contract was forged. The characters must trace the contract, identify the broker, and determine what the industrialist actually traded, because his wife has just discovered that she cannot remember their wedding and their children do not recognize their father’s photograph.

Why It Matters: The Velvet Casefiles asks who protects people from crimes that the legal system cannot acknowledge. The detectives are not heroes. They are professionals working cases in a city that pretends their cases do not exist. The setting is about the gap between the world’s official story and its actual operation, and the specific exhaustion of people who spend their careers in that gap, solving problems that nobody will thank them for because nobody will admit the problems are real.