Project MONUMENT

Although it was ostensibly a first edition Hunter: The Vigil campaign, by its conclusion Project MONUMENT had more in common with a stress test of Chronicles of Darkness crossover mechanics. It was set in Paris in the present day and stole plot hooks and setting material shamelessly from the SCP Foundation wiki and from "A Colder War" by Charles Stross.

Project MONUMENT ran from January 2010 through January 2012, took a hiatus of about six months, and concluded in the winter of 2013 with its 100th session. The GM was Beth with support from Humbleminion and Jinx.

PCs

 * Bo Ellings, an American ex-police officer. She encountered a mentor spirit on a World War I battlefield who inducted her into Les Mystères. She was later revealed to be a Promethean who had achieved humanity - and notably, the only one in recorded history ever to give birth to a child (her estranged daughter Mallory).
 * Josette Gautier, Robert's daughter and assistant. Bitten by a werewolf and turned into one (using homebrew rules because I didn't own a copy of Werewolf: The Forsaken).
 * Robert Gautier, chief of staff to the mayor of Paris. His wife Marie-Julie disappeared mysteriously several years before the campaign began. His spreadsheet of contacts was a terror to behold. He eventually Awakened as an Acanthus mage and joined the Free Council.
 * Aðalsteinn Lokisson, an Icelandic archaeologist. Joined Aegis Kai Doru and got roped into collecting magical Nazi gold at the behest of a dead Atlantean slasher, who his parents had previously served.
 * Roland Raine, an elderly eccentric who had retired from the French Foreign Legion. Joined VASCU. His mysterious past eventually caught up to him and the party learned he had once been a Soviet spy who had gone into hiding to escape the Doorknocker, a powerful slasher.
 * Rho Souna, a Korean immigrant, cellist, and changeling (Southern Court Fairest/Shadowsoul/Dancer). The only PC not on the plane in the first session, she encountered the others while investigating the same changeling-related mystery as them. She refused to dance on the tank.

Allied NPCs

 * Father Bruno Charrette aka John Paul, a Catholic priest and Mastigos Free Council mage who watched over a Hallow in the belfry of his parish. He ran afoul of a Banisher whom the PCs chased off, and henceforth became their ally.
 * Chrétien Morte, shock-rock musician, owner of the club Ice & Fire, and leader of an Ashwood Abbey cell with whom the PCs frequently collaborated.
 * Chul-soo, Souna's changeling mentor.
 * Damiane aka Clio, a professional Tarot reader and Robert's friend from their university days. She turned out to have been a real mage all along, and became Robert's mentor. The rest of the PCs shipped her with Robert hard; Robert's player, less so.
 * Emmanuel, a Galatean Promethean living in the catacombs near the PCs' hideout.
 * Dr. Freund, a back-alley doctor whose services the SCP Foundation contracted on behalf of the PCs at their request. A victim of human experimentation, he could temporarily Hulk out with a super-serum, which he memorably used in defense of the PCs on a few occasions.
 * Lenore, the Autumn Queen of the Parisian Changeling court.
 * Malus Sylvestris, a founder of the SCP Foundation and the person who came up with Project MONUMENT.
 * Peach, a clairvoyant human SCP assigned to Peach's team to observe the PCs at all times and report on their actions.

Antagonists

 * Alice Lapin, the former Summer Queen of the Parisian Changeling court, and secretly a loyalist
 * Andrew Bishop aka Sloan, Bo's ex-husband and a Seer of the Throne in league with the CthulhuNazis
 * Cthulhu. Yes, that Cthulhu.
 * Daniel, an Atlantean slasher imprisoned in Aðalsteinn's family's ancestral magic torch
 * The Doorknocker, a powerful slasher from Roland's past
 * Eliot Abril, a vampire who the PCs went full rabid shark on early in the game
 * The Gardener, a True Fae and Souna's former captor, who was also imprisoning Marie-Julie
 * Gorgon, a Centimani Promethean and Emmanuel's demiurge

Plot Summary
The SCP Foundation became aware of the existence of hunters, and decided to learn more about them by engineering a situation in which they could follow a group of newly-minted hunters for the duration of their careers. The PCs, with the exception of Souna, were all passengers on a red-eye flight from New York City to Paris. The flight became delayed past sunrise, which caused a vampire aboard to go into frenzy. The PCs worked together to subdue Michael, who apparently died in the scuffle (but of course he was only in torpor, and caused problems for them later). A briefcase he was carrying contained a letter of introduction to Eliot Abril, a more powerful vampire in Paris. Upon deplaning, each piece of the PCs' luggage contained a map and key that led them to a safehouse in the catacombs, accessible via the Paris Metro. Documents left there informed them of various supernatural happenings in Paris, and offered them various rewards if they investigated the leads and reported back to their mystery benefactors.

In the course of their investigations, the PCs met Souna and inserted themselves into various supernatural goings-on in Paris. This included digging into Eliot's background, which caused him to push back against them. In true PC fashion they went full salted earth on all of his operations. Their struggle culminated in the PCs invading Eliot's lair in a bank vault, killing him, and capturing one of his minions and shipping it off to SCP for further study, which solidified their alliance with the Foundation.

The PCs' defeat of Eliot brought them to the attention of other hunters in Paris, and they soon got involved with other compacts and conspiracies operating in the city. Aðalsteinn became fascinated by his apparent ancestral history of monster hunting, and by a weird old torch that had been in his family's possession for as long as he knew. The torch occasionally displayed minor magical properties related to healing and disrupting other supernatural powers, which seemed to grow stronger after making contact with some (but not all) forms of gold (it had to be magical gold that specifically came from Atlantis, as the PCs found out later). When lit, its flame would bend in the direction of the closest golden item that would increase its power. This led to many delightful (?) sidequests.

Meanwhile, Souna's mentor tasked her with investigating the disappearances of many members of the Korean immigrant community in Paris, who were vanishing in ways that suggested the Gentry might be kidnapping them with help from a loyalist in the city. Evidence pointed to an unpopular changeling named Suzette Starchild as the culprit, who was banished when the PCs brought their information to the local monarchs. However, the real loyalist was the Summer Queen, Alice Lapin, and the kidnappings continued. Eventually, Robert's "hunter-curious" niece Eloise was among the victims, and the PCs entered the Hedge in pursuit. This trip had momentous consequences for many of the PCs: Alice's plans were thwarted and she fled back to Arcadia, Robert Awakened as an Acanthus mage, Roland regained his youth as a side effect of faerie magic, and Aðalsteinn discovered that the torch contained a spirit that, with permission, could possess him and give him superpowers. Fun times!

After returning from the Hedge, Roland's few surviving contacts from his Legionnaire days started turning up dead in familiar ways, and he realized that his old nemesis the Doorknocker was responsible. Long ago, Roland and his spy buddies tortured the Doorknocker and sent her family to a gulag, causing her to become a slasher and seek revenge on all of them. When Roland went to ground, she went dormant, but a handler later reawakened her only to completely lose control of her as soon as she saw young Roland. The Doorknocker's handler eventually was made to explain a bunch of metaplot, namely that he was employed by a cabal of undead Nazi occultists who had summoned Cthulhu in the waning days of the Second World War and let it suck them into its dimension to hang out getting even more corrupted by it. The PCs fled to Moscow, where they narrowly defeated the Doorknocker, but it was clear from there that things had gotten real.

The PCs gradually discovered that Cthulhu's ongoing influence was warping the Hedge and affecting Arcadia in a way that encroached upon the Gentry's territory. Various groups who had found out about these changes were trying to take advantage of them on behalf of their own factions: the changelings and the True Face, the SCP Foundation (with various groups inside the Foundation having a power struggle to control the narrative), the Seers of the Throne, the entity inside Aðalsteinn's torch, and the CthulhuNazis themselves. All of these groups fought each other (and amongst themselves) chaotically in a long series of over-the-top set pieces. Eventually their conflict started bleeding into the physical world. Malus Sylvestris dispatched the PCs to Arcadia to imprison or defeat both the Doorknocker and Cthulhu (who had possessed Silvio Berlusconi). In the end, the PCs prevailed, permanently banishing the dark forces and even rescuing Marie-Julie from the Gardener along the way. They returned home to rebuild supernatural society as high-ranking members of their various factions.

One interesting result of the campaign's events was that in this world, the True Fae were effectively wiped out in the conflict with Cthulhu, which left Arcadia largely vacant and ripe for exploration and potential reclamation. I would still love to explore the consequences of this event in a future Changeling campaign.

Memorable Moments

 * In the first session, when the PCs arrived at their safehouse in the catacombs, I gave them a prop: a crate containing various weird items and plot hooks. Watching my players go through it was delightful, particularly when they realized that the bottle of sparkling wine it contained was still cold but there was no refrigerator in sight...
 * Bo being a former Promethean was not planned ahead of time. The idea arose naturally out of the player engaging strongly with the Promethean subplots in the game, and was one of the times I most successfully listened to what a campaign was trying to tell me.
 * The first time the PCs visited the changeling court, Roland spontaneously presented them with a gift: a pair of wooden shoes filled with candy, which Roland's player also presented to the table in physical form. The monarchs were thoroughly charmed (and so was I).
 * Aðalsteinn's quest for gold had many hilarious moments. The most indelible occurred when the PCs followed the torch to a rural Swedish farmhouse where an elderly woman was sleeping, with golden fillings in her teeth. Thanks to a truly ridiculous Perception roll (something like 11 successes), it turned out that this woman's late husband had been a dentist, and that all of his dentistry tools were packed away in the farmhouse's basement. The PCs pulled several of her molars while she slept and fled under cover of darkness.
 * The final fight with the Doorknocker was extremely difficult and the closest I have ever come to TPK'ing a party. If a couple of dice rolls had gone slightly differently, the only survivor of the combat would have been Souna, who spent the entire time being incorporeal and having a slapfight with a ghost on a different level of the building.
 * Robert's response every time somebody asked him if mages were allowed to do an ethically questionable thing with their magic: "It's...frowned upon."
 * In the last sessions, during the approach to the Gardener's domain, the PCs finally got to have a tank.

(Anyone who played in this campaign should feel free to add their own memories here.)