The Dragon Hunters

An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.

Dragon sightings over Cappadocia.

Bat-winged lizard longer than a train car wheeling in the sky over Mount Erciyes, the honeycomb fortress of Uchisar, the Red Valley cave churches and the penis-shaped spires of the Valley of Love. Peasants cowering as the shadow passes over them.

No photographs. No reliable witnesses - just superstitious locals. The Minister for the Interior, acting on repeated petitions from the peasants, has put a bounty on its head. He does not expect it to be claimed.

There’s been several funny stories about it in the papers. A three-page piece in Molla Nasreddin - a satirical Azerbaijani magazine, formerly independent, now published by the Soviet League of Militant Atheists - which decries it as an example of typical peasant superstition.

The bounty’s not that big. But a few prospective dragon hunters have signed up.

The Nevşehir Expedition.

Organised by Nureddin Pasha. General in WWI and the Turkish War of Independence. Stopped the British advance at the Battle of Ctesiphon. Crushed the Kurdish Koçgiri rebellion. Expelled and slaughtered Greeks as Governor of the Pontus.

Burnt down Smyrna, killing tens of thousands, and had the archbishop Chrysostomos Kalafatis lynched by an angry mob. Had a previous Interior Minister kidnapped and stoned to death, then hung his body by a railway line to intimidate the Prime Minister as he travelled past.

Retired from the military. Now an independent MP for Bursa. Refers to himself in the third person as the defender of Baghdad and the vanquisher of Yemen.

House in Bursa is a cluttered warehouse full of old Turkic artefacts - a 16th-century manuscript of the Book of Dede Korkut, a Barbary pirate’s map of Antarctica, an ostensibly Cimmerian sword. Codex fragments found in a Mayan temple, seemingly written in a proto-Turkic primal language.

Stone icons from the Altai Mountains. Antlered headdress of a Tengrist shaman from the Orkhon Valley. Sumerian board game featuring grey wolves as pieces. Forgers have become aware that he’ll buy anything, without question, so long as it proves that the Turks are one people and the greatest race on Earth.

Topal Osman, Terror of the Pontus, commands a battalion of ex-soldiers in the Expedition’s service. Massacred Greeks across Trebizond. Threw children into wells and dropped stones on their heads. Famous for killing ten Christians a day. Walks with a limp. Reports that his corpse was hung up outside Parliament in 1924 have been debunked. Frustratingly lucky and well-organised - keeps on dodging death.

Hans von Osten, archaeologist, has proven to his satisfaction by measuring skulls across Anatolia that Turks are not yellow mongrels, but rather brachycephalic members of the Alpine Aryan race. Through his Thule Society connections, has secured the Expedition the use of the secretly constructed LZ-124 zeppelin, which is formally prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles.

Ahmet Ali Çelikten, world’s first black fighter pilot, captains the zeppelin. Born in Smyrna to a family from Cairo - ultimately of Nigerian descent. Fought in the Gallipoli campaign. Ecstatic at the idea of dogfighting a dragon. Not so interested in the racial component of the project. Loves Turkey. Thinks Kemal Mustafa is doing a great job. Hans doesn’t like him but his skills are indispensable.

St. George Littledale. English big game hunter, active across Russia and Tibet. Friends with Theodore Roosevelt. Knows Central Asia from the Tian Shan to the Caucasus. Hung up his spurs twenty years ago to become a Justice of the Peace in Berkshire. In his seventies. Wife has just died. Coming out of retirement for one last job. Has seen lots of funny things, but not a dragon - unconvinced they exist.

The Ark Society.

Rivals to the Nevşehir Expedition. Secretive. Composed of people who have climbed Mount Ararat and discovered the crashed spaceship on the western summit - full of preserved animals in pairs. A metal disc half-buried in the snow. Those who go inside won’t speak of what they saw, but they come out armed with strange knowledge.

Haji Yearam, a humble Armenian shepherd, hired by Soviet atheists to guide them to the top of the mountain and prove there’s nothing there. Converted to Seventh Day Adventism after the atheists were all killed in a flash of light. Speaks of the mountain as Ak-Dagh, the mysterious abode of the jinn.

Vladimir Roskovitsky, a Russian fighter pilot who saw the Ark in 1917 while testing a new airplane, and tried to report it to his superiors as definitive proof of the veracity of the Christian faith - only to narrowly dodge death at the hands of Leon Trotsky, who’d just taken over the government and wanted to cover it up.

Captain Roger Gascoyne, a British scientist and hardline materialist who was appointed by Sultan Abdul Hamid II to investigate the mountain in the late 1890s. Only survivor of his expedition. Came out utterly convinced that every word of the Bible was literally true - though unable to explain exactly why.

John Joseph Nouri, born in Baghdad, archdeacon of the Chaldean Catholic Church. A grand old bearded patriarch. Found the Ark in 1887 and toured America, lecturing on it, under the titles of Grand Apostolic Ambassador and First Universal Exploring Traveler of One Million Miles. Locked up for some time in the Napa Insane Asylum.

The Arkists are not as well-funded as Nureddin, but they do have a beaten-up old biplane and quite a lot of guns. Certain that the dragon exists, as an avatar of Satan on Earth, and completely serious about killing it.

Cautious relationship with Ibrahim Heski, president of the Kurdish Republic of Ararat, which has just declared its independence from Turkey and is determined to fight to maintain it. Half a dozen Kurdish guerillas, in turbans and baggy trousers with bandoliers slung across their chests, are travelling with them. The Kurds are of course Muslims (except for one Yazidi) but it hasn’t been a problem so far.

An underground city in the Red Valley.

Populated by reclusive Christians who went down there after the Battle of Manzikert and never came out. Troglodytes. Sixty thousand of them, packed into the beehive tunnels of their miles-deep metropolis. You see them scuttling through the fairy pinnacles from time to time, catching rabbits to liven up their supper.

Nothing in the caves can reproduce or die. Frederick Barbarossa is down there with a hundred knights of the Third Crusade, and as many camp followers. Soldiers of the Ilkhanate bump shoulders with Danishmend ghazi raiders. Their king is a man named Chrysocheres, a ninth-century Paulician rebel whose touch turns small animals to gold.

Chrysocheres’ mother Alk is a dwarf with iron teeth and copper nails, boar tusks and fiery eyes, sagging breasts thrown back across her shoulders. Steals peasant children to keep the city’s population up. Can turn invisible. Wears a hat made of bells, so you can hear her coming. Nose made from clay. If you break it off, she’ll do anything to get it back.

At the very bottom of the city there’s a door, guarded by Neti. A doorman. Well-dressed, thin moustache, polite but formal. Explains in simple terms that this is the gateway to the underworld. How it works is - you kill the dragon, take the stone from its head, give it to him and he’ll permit you to enter the realm of Death. Presided over by the chameleon god Nergal and his consort, Ereshkigal.

You can bring any one person back with you. Any human who has ever died in the entire history of the world.

Greek merchants, hiding in the caves from the Turkish army, woke the dragon up.

His name is Zahak. He’s annoyed and hungry. He nests on Mount Erciyes, in a steaming crater full of half-eaten sheep.

Sometimes he kidnaps a local peasant girl for a few days. Keeps her around, chatting to her about finance and politics, for as long as she remains interesting. Esma, from nearby Ortahisir, is sitting in his nest right now. Desperately trying to remember all the village gossip she knows. Hoping her boyfriend Bayram cares enough to try to get her back.

He’ll come back to life, eventually, if he dies. This has happened before. Usually spends several hundred years sleeping underground between rampages.

Nureddin has researched all of this in Byzantine archives. Proved, to his satisfaction, that Saint George was a Turk and the Eastern Patriarchs covered it up. Unhappy with Kemal Mustafa’s leadership, he plans to resurrect Suleiman the Magnificent, who’ll restore the Ottoman Caliphate and lead the Turks into a new golden age.

The Ark Society wants to resurrect Jesus Christ and bring on the Second Coming. They see no flaws at all in this plan. Seems perfectly Biblical to them. The Kurds if they get a chance will bring back Saladin instead - as history’s greatest Kurdish champion, they figure he could probably help them out.