The Cold War Spoilers
A bunch of my friends play in The Cold War, a Harry Potter PBJ, and they've just had the legs knocked out from under them by the death of Ron Weasley at the hands of Bellatrix LeStrange.

My absolute first instinct in a situation like this is Ron faked his own death. The rest of the story falls out from that, so I'm pretty sure this is what those of you in TCW are going to discover over the next few months of play.


Ron faked his own death to go undercover in order to stop something terrible from happening. He's gone undercover before (end of Book 6), so it's the sort of thing he'd think of. We'll get to why Ron, who'd go to his friends for help in any sort of dire situation, can't in this case.

We know from the general campaign setting that Dolores Umbridge, the Minister of Magic, is a lead villain, she's opposed to Voldemort partisans, and her goal is to seize power for herself. Her public tactics so far have been George Bush-style executive authority power grabs. Obviously, what's going on to send Ron undercover is Umbridge's master plan to seize total authority over the world of wizarding.

What Dolores needs is a big giant catastrophe to strike the wizarding world, like happened with Bush. Thematically, that's obvious: She's going to blow up Gringott's. This is a sudden strike at the heart of wizarding that also destabilizes the wizard economy. Now, the plan can go one of two ways, either of which is equivalent for our purposes: Either she manipulates Bellatrix into doing it, or she frames Bellatrix for it. She needs a Death Eater to play the role of enemy, and we know she intends it to be Bellatrix because that's who Ron implicates in his death.

Ron's purpose in implicating Bellatrix is to make it harder for Umbridge to use Bellatrix, by focusing attention on Bellatrix before Umbridge's plot goes off. In fact, all this is going to do is move up Umbridge's schedule; see below.

Here's what's really going on. Over the last week or so, Ron Weasley has learned a couple of things. First, the Ministry of Magic has moved all of its funds out of Gringott's, something Ron's father complains about, not believing Umbridge's claims that it will "streamline the machinery of government". Second, the Ministry has put an obscure book called "On the Properties of Jinn and Ifrit", by Josef El-Adrin, on its interdicted list. Ron learns the latter on a visit to Hogwarts to see Hermione (and learn important news from her; see below), where he happens to hear the librarian muttering to himself about having to purge the book. He looks up the book to find that the only other registered copy is in the Durmstrang Institute.

That Friday night, he runs into his old acquaintance Victor Krum at the big ball. He takes Victor aside and asks about the book; Victor doesn't know it, but his mentor at Drumstrang would be familiar with it, and the two send an owl off to Bulgaria to ask. The answer comes the next day, and the contents are shocking. Josef El-Adrin was a Slav living under Ottoman rule and trained in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and Baghdad, where he had the opportunity to learn from many Arabian wizards. The book is mostly a discussion of Jinn and Ifrit, which are familiar from the 1,001 Arabian Nights, except for the final chapter, where El-Adrin takes off from Aladdin's observation that a Jinn is "all the power of the universe ... itty-bitty living space" and notes that energy confined to a small volume is functionally a bomb. He subsequently developed a theoretical mechanism for destroying a Jinn's vessel while the Jinn is trapped inside; he estimates the energy release at approximately 15 kilothaum, or more than five times the power of the largest known exothermic spells.

Ron puts two and two together and realizes the basic structure of Umbridge's plan--she's going to blow up Gringott's with a Jinn bomb, blame an enemy that everyone will unite against (there's a clue needed here that points Ron at Bellatrix, but that's for the second draft to finalize), and use the whole thing as an excuse to declare martial law and make herself the absolute ruler of the wizarding world.

Ron returns to Victor, to tell him to instruct his mentor to get the only remaining copy of the book and keep it safe before Umbridge's agents can destroy it, but when he gets to Victor's hotel room, he finds that Victor has been killed, horribly destroyed by something worse than a Dementor. [Umbridge is becoming her own kind of Voldemort, creating a sort of second-generation Dementor, which also ups the danger stakes for our heroes. Also, if we could call the creator of the Dementor mk IIs the "Master Mold", and they had purple and grey highlights, that would be awesome.]

Now, Ron's in serious trouble--Umbridge knows that somebody is onto her, and she's cleaning up after herself. Ron would do what Ron normally does when he's in trouble or when something important has to be done, which is to go to his friends for help. But Harry's in a coma. That leaves Hermione. But he can't go to Hermione: She's pregnant! Ron is the only one who knows; Hermione hasn't even told Neville yet. [Technically, not even Hermione's player knows she's pregnant, but we need a story reason for Ron to leave her out of this.] One person's already been killed to keep this secret; Ron won't dare endanger Hermione.

There's no choice. He's got to fake his own death, go undercover, and find a way to stop Umbridge. He's going to need a body, so the first stop is somebody who can help him, but he needs somebody who can keep a secret without asking inconvenient questions. Who is not entirely clear. In any case, over the next 48 hours, Ron procures a suitably mutilated body and sets up his own death scene before vanishing. In fact, it might even be Victor's body, disguised as Ron's; concealing the fact of Victor's death will confuse things further and help give Ron a head start.

Now, it's a race: He's just learned that Umbridge has sent her mindwiped minion Marietta to Baghdad. Ron's got to beat her there and prevent her from obtaining a Jinn while Umbridge's Dementor mk IIs try to stop him.

From there, things can either play out in a Ron's-the-hero style, or a Ron's-the-maguffin fashion. In either case, Marietta obtains the Jinn. In the former case, Ron races her back to London, avoiding Dementor mk IIs at every turn, in order to stop Umbridge's plan at the last possible moment; in the latter case, Ron is captured, and the PCs have to follow his trail, unravel the backstory, and rescue Ron from the Dementor mk IIs at Azkaban mk II and stop Umbridge's plan at the last possible moment.

And that's what's really going on in The Cold War. Just thought you'd like to know.

Much credit to greeneyes_rpi, aka Marcus and Molly, for assistance while I worked this out.


ETA: Obviously, the TCW players and mods can use this silliness in any way they see fit.