Mr. Plot Hook (RPG All)

This week's post  is dedicated to Rent-A-Hitman, the only professional killer service with a HIPPA (Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964) guarantee.

The site, operated by Californian repo-man Bob Innes and not Guido Fanelli, alleged owner of a family business that's been in operation since the 1920s, has been in operation since Innes came up with the joke company back in 2005. Some people take it very seriously. Wendy Wein of Michigan hired Guido to off her husband, only to discover that Rent-A-Hitman was, alas, a fake site. You can't really call it a scam, since the intent was never to defraud. Innes keeps the site going as a modern version of the big store, with all serious enquiries passed to law enforcement for follow-up.

Wendy pled guilty earlier this month and will be sentenced in January. She's looking at a potential 9-year bit, possibly more. 

"I really didn’t think that people were gonna be that stupid," Innes told Rolling Stone. "Boy, did they show me." 

In RPG terms, Guido/Innes is a variation on Mister Johnson. He's the middleman who sets you - that is, you the characters - up with a job. Nobody ever sees his face. He's the voice on the other end of the phone, the admin behind the website. Except in this instance there is no Mr. Johnson; there's just a dude setting you up for a fall. 

Mr. Johnsons are often seen as shady types setting the characters up for a fall. It happens so often, in fact, that some systems go out of their way to explicitly say their Mr. Johnson is a stand-up fella who would never lie. The Esoterrorists, for instance, says outright that Mr. or Ms. Verity does not tell lies. They may not know the whole truth, but they won't stab you in the back. 

Whereas the handlers in Delta Green might well withhold information if it suits them, or set agents up for something nasty - particularly if this is Fall Of, where the agency is on shaky ground from the get-go. Meanwhile Shadowrun's iconic Mr. Johnsons are about as reliable as a chocolate teapot, and the less said about the fixers and bullshit artists of Cyberpunk, the better. 

Which got me thinking: how best to play with the Mr. Johnson concept?

The mysterious employer who turns up mysteriously dead has been used once or twice before. Perhaps the most notorious version is Our Good Friend Jackson Elias from Call of Cthulhu's Masks of Nyarlathotep, though the Dracula Dossier pulls a similar stunt with Hawkins. Call of Cthulhu also has Professor Smith from Horror on the Orient Express, who brings the characters together, funds them, sets them on their way and then keels over dead at the appropriate moment.  

The mysterious employer who turns out to be a bad-ass is less widely used, but not uncommon. Again, going back to Shadowrun, the Great Western Dragon Lofwyr occasionally masquerades as a Johnson, or in this instance a Herr Brackhaus. Dracula Dossier also plays on this a little bit, in that any of their Legacies or more esoteric Johnsons could turn out to be a master spy or supernatural entity playing at being human. 

The mysterious employer who turns out to be a puppet of sinister forces is perhaps a little too mechanically similar to the mysterious employer who turns out to be an evil back-stabber, or the main villain. Still, you could get some play out of that, particularly if 'puppet' in this instance is literal - that the Johnson is just skin, or a mask, with nothing organic underneath. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, says the Great and Powerful Oz ...

One possible alternative to the puppet scenario is a Mr. Johnson who's being squeezed, maybe because they owe someone money. This version will not have the characters' best interests at heart, but that doesn't mean they actually want to betray the characters. No, what Mr. Johnson wants is to be free of the complicating factor that's making his life a living hell. That makes him unreliable, but not automatically evil. If the complicating factor can be dealt with, Mr. Johnson's reliability improves dramatically.

Hitman the video game series makes good use of a Mr. Johnson - in this case, a Ms. Burnwood - who works with the titular Hitman to bring down the system from within. They both have their reasons for wanting to destroy the agency they work for, the International Contract Agency (ICA). While they marshal their forces they carry out a series of assassinations for ICA's clients, waiting for the day when they can turn ICA inside out and gut it. In that instance Ms. Burnwood is 100% (or, well, 99% at least) trustworthy, but the agency they both work for definitely is not.

E3 2015 Trailer

In Dracula Dossier terms, a similar arrangement could easily be had with Edom, the spy agency that brought Dracula in from the cold. The agents could be loyal servants of the Crown, at least outwardly, while their Mr. Johnson helps them take Edom apart from within.

Alternatively in DD Damned campaigns, or anything with a strong supernatural element, your Mr. Johnson could, quite literally, be working for God. The Mysterious Monseigneur is a DD classic, but really any setting with clerics who serve a particular deity would fit. In such a situation your characters aren't just trying to fulfil a contract or obligation; they're trying to please a supernatural sugar daddy. 

Again, Mr. Johnson can be exactly as they seem to be and yet not. So for example the Mysterious Monseigneur could have all the trappings and outward appearance of a man of God, and yet be serving Satan - which would be a magnificent third act twist.

That's enough for this week. Enjoy!

 

The Room Where It Happens (Dracula Dossier)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC)

Standing, Sam sank his hands in his pockets, shook his head, and, rather as Jerry Westerby might have done, began meandering about the room, peering at the odd gloomy things that hung on the wall: group war photographs of dons in uniform; a framed and handwritten letter from a dead Prime Minister; Karla's portrait again, which this time he studied from very close, on and on.

John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy.

Portrait of Dracula (Dracula Dossier Item)

appearance: An oil painting on cheap canvas. Painted by the artist Francis Aytown, this painting depicts the faces of two men, one old and one young. The features of the two men are extremely similar, and might be father and son, or possibly even the same man at different stages of his life.

The elder has a strong, aquiline nose with oddly arched nostrils, a high forehead, thick white-gray hair and a white mustache. His heavy eyebrows and teeth are emphasized by the artist, and his dark eyes seem to follow the observer around the room. He has a livid red scar on his forehead. 

The younger figure has dark hair and a mustache, and appears full of youth and vitality. In contrast to the paleness of the elder, his face is ruddy. The artist appears to have been indecisive over whether or not the subject had a beard - the younger figure’s chin appears muddy and was painted over several times (Photography: X-ray analysis shows that the figure was originally bearded). The same scar is present, but much less noticeable due to the change in complexion. 

The neck and shoulders of both figures are merely hinted at. In both cases, the portrait is oddly unsettling, as the proportions and perspectives are subtly off ...

The Honourable Schoolboy is the second in le Carré's Karla trilogy. In the first, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Soviet spymaster Karla recruits a British agent who rises to the very top of the British spy establishment. Thanks to the efforts of George Smiley, Karla's man is knocked out of the Circus and the Soviet intrusion largely dismantled. 

In this second novel Smiley is now the Circus ringmaster, but the old place has fallen on hard times. Nobody knows who to trust; the networks and agents promoted by Karla's man were deliberately chosen to be ineffective, and the Americans - the Cousins - have no faith in the Circus now its lead performer has been exposed as a fraud. 

The Circus rebuilds - or at least it tries to. Thus begins The Honourable Schoolboy.

One of the recurring elements in that novel is Karla's portrait, which Smiley has deliberately placed at the heart of the Circus so everyone who visits Smiley in his offices can see it. The portrait is a slightly ghoulish reminder of the Circus' recent failings, and it appears again and again in the opening chapters. 

Which made me think of that mysterious portrait of Dracula, listed as one of the items the agents might find in the Dracula Dossier. As with all such items it might be Major, Minor or Fraudulent - that is, really useful, moderately useful, or bogus.

However the point le Carré makes is that the portrait on its own isn't worth a damn. What matters is how you display it, and where. 

Karla's photograph might have been put anywhere. It might have been on Smiley's desk, where only he could see it. It might have been in some secure vault, or hung in the lavatory. Smiley deliberately gives it prominence front and center, where everyone can see it. What's more, by hanging it in the same room as those wartime photographs of the old crew and the congratulatory letter from a dead Prime Minister (presumably Churchill, though it might as easily have been Clement Attlee) Smiley links Karla with the glorious past. It's a reminder to everyone who visits the Circus that the past is tainted, and hints that the Circus needs to redeem itself.

Which brings me back to that portrait of Dracula. Again, what matters isn't so much the portrait itself - though the portrait is important, and might be very important. What matters is where it is displayed, and by whom. A portrait doesn't exist simply to exist. Like all art it exists to be seen, and how it is seen determines its effect and thus its value to the onlooker. 

Dracula's portrait hung in a pub corridor that leads to the Gents is worth little. It might have been picked up as a job lot with half a dozen ink sketches of hounds at bay and a few ill-conceived bits of taxidermy. Dracula's portrait hung in the corridors of Edom has a completely different kind of significance, even if those corridors happen to be moldering and forgotten. 

Dracula's portrait hung in the ultra-modern offices of the new and improved Edom has a different significance again. 

So as an exercise in gamification, consider: what is that room like? What significance does it hold?

I'm going to assume for the purpose of this exercise that the room has the same significance as the portrait and might have similar, or related, characteristics. As you know, there are several different flavors of vampire chronicle: damned, supernatural, alien, mutant. I'm not going to delve into that here since exactly how that factors into your room will depend entirely on you. I'm simply going to say that it naturally will have an influence on the room. A Damned chronicle bears Damned fruit, after all.

I'm also going to assume three kinds of room: modern Edom, decayed Edom, other non-Edom. The other non-Edom could be anything from a superyacht's stateroom to a Legacy's apartments in Rome to a museum or art gallery. The precise location is up to you as Director.

With all that in mind:

Major    

In his obsession, Aytown captured something more — he caught some psychic essence or echo of the Count ...

Modern Edom (eg. the map room at HMS Proserpine, the conference rooms at Seward's Asylum). 

This portrait is among a collection of valued trophies, diagrams, schematics and satellite photographs of recent areas of operation. It is deliberately placed there by D as a reminder to the modern Edom of the kind of asset they are dealing with - cruel, implacable, and dangerous. Fort and Tinman have rigged its glass case with explosives as an anti-theft measure; if anyone tries to remove the painting the detonation should destroy the painting but leave the rest of the room more or less intact.

Decayed Edom (eg. some forgotten offices near Whitehall, an abandoned military installation, Ring). 

These dusty offices had some importance back in the 1970s, which is probably the last time any of the Dukes visited this place. The place stinks of mold and rats. Old filing cabinets long emptied of their secrets loll like hanged men, their tongues - the cabinets - swinging free. Photographs from the Second World War and old silver trophies and cups from some regiment still shine in their cabinets, but that regiment was amalgamated and forgotten back in the 1960s and not even the most dedicated military historian bothers to remember the regiment once had its home here.

Other Non-Edom

This is a peculiar collection put together by someone with an amusing mind. The portrait is in a place of honour where everyone who enters by the main hall can see it, but it is matched with Surrealist masterpieces and a rather nasty-looking portrait of the inmates of a a lunatic asylum, either a Goya or someone heavily influenced by the old Spaniard. The effect is dizzying; there is no corner of the room any observer can look at, and find comfort. 

Minor

Aytown’s portrait can be used to recognize the Count, but it has no other supernatural powers.

Modern Edom

This hangs in the offices of the commandant, perhaps D or the officer in charge of E Squadron. These are spartan rooms, and the portrait is the only art in the place; there isn't even a photo of the commandant's family on their imposing desk. It hangs there sullen and silent, like a child summoned to the Headmaster's office. All meaning seems to have been surgically removed, as if so many uncaring eyes having stared at it for over a century has sapped the painting's will - always assuming it had one in the first place.

Decayed Edom

At some point some forgotten bureaucrat thought it would be a good idea to strip the place of its valuables and put them in storage, but the plan never got quite so far as 'storage.' The portrait is in a back room along with a score of other items, carefully labeled back in the 1980s, and there are packing crates here in which the job lot was clearly meant to be sealed up. Whether money dried up, the bureaucrat lost interest or some other minor disaster happened, who can say? It's all a bit King Tut's Tomb, though if there is a curse it probably hit its expiration date long ago.

Other Non-Edom

The white patches on the wall indicate what happened to the actually valuable art. What's left are the dregs of a collection, some moderately interesting modernists, some Scots Baronial stuff, and a rather odd collection of statuary all jumbled together with no sense of order or style. Whoever acquired this portrait mislabeled it at Jacobethan, and (if this is an art gallery) is trying to sell it for at least twice its actual value.

Fraud

The portrait was actually painted by Viv Aytown-Baptiste, in an attempt to copy her great-grandfather’s style.

Modern Edom

This hangs in the offices of an Edom underling and was bought as a joke that didn't quite come off. It shares space with two Gantt charts and a dartboard, and has acquired several unfortunate holes in consequence. The dartboard has a photo of one of the Edom princes at its center; who can say why?

Decayed Edom

Once upon a time someone thought this was the real deal, and paid rather a lot of government money to purchase it. Embarrassment followed on swift and noisy stamping feet, and the prize was hurriedly moved somewhere where nobody important had to look at it. The typists in the pool, who have to look at it every day, sometimes wonder what happened to that high-flier who thought he was on to something good. Rumor has it he occupied that office at the end of the hall, the one that's now used for storage, until his dismissal in the middle 1990s. Or perhaps he was moved to the offices in Edinburgh. Or perhaps shame killed him. 

Other Non-Edom

It's odd what some people think ought to hang in the second lavatory, the one used by guests. Maybe it was meant to be a joke. It looks more valuable than, perhaps, its owner thinks it is. 

Enjoy!

At the Crossroads (RPG All)

Our knowledge of London is increased by the buried dead. The suicides of the city were, until 1823, buried at a particular crossroads that still exists at the junction of Grovesnor Place and Hobart Place; it may therefore be deemed to be an unlucky spot. Peter Ackroyd, London Under: The Secret History Beneath The Streets

 

Faust, directed by F.W. Murnau of Nosferatu fame 

What is a crossroads? Why is it significant?

From Bullfinch's Mythology: The place where two or more roads intersect. Something sinister about crossroads has made such conjunction of highways a matter of interest for superstitions, beliefs and customs connected with this particular spot. Crossroads superstition was prevalent generally throughout Europe, in India, Japan, Greece, among the Mongols and the American Indians. Here were to be found demons, evil spirits, ghosts and witches, sprites, kobolds and faeries. It was the burial place of suicides and murderers, a dump-heap for parricides, and a rendezvous for witches who frequently used this uncanny place for their sabbat revels. Anything might plainly happen here. People feared and avoided this meeting of the ways. 

Divinities were sometimes associated with the crossroads, perhaps to repel or neutralize the evil influences attached to the locality. In Greek mythology, both Hermes and Hecate were connected with the crossroads. Such ceremonies were practiced at this spot as sacrifice, offerings, divination and many magic rites.   

So this is a spot where the influences of the normal world are weakest, where strange things lurk and occasionally peep through the cracks. In Esoterror terms, the Membrane is weak here.

It's also a psychic dumping ground. If you bury your unwanted or evil dead all in one spot, you have to expect some kind of spiritual leakage from all those unclean corpses.

As can be seen from the Murnau clip, the best - that is, the most evocative - crossroads are far from any sign of human life. So far distant from light, warmth and all things comforting, it is easy to see how such a fell and lonely spot might loom large in popular imagination. 

Of course, things change. New York's Times Square Broadway is a crossroads. It's difficult to imagine a less lonely spot on the planet; at any time of day you're bound to meet someone there. Whether you want to meet them or not is something else again. That, and there would have been a time when what is now Times Square was just a collection of dirt tracks separating farmsteads, just as lonely and desolate as you like. Cities grow, and swallow the lonely places.

Ackroyd mentioned a particular spot in London:

As you can see from the map the crossroads he cites are right on what is now Grosvenor Gardens, among other things. Some very high-end houses, hotels and businesses round that way, which presumably haven't been put off by the miasma from the suicides buried beneath their businesses and cafes. Clearly it can't be that unlucky a spot.

Although you do have to wonder what it's like at midnight.

Gamification:

Assignation at a Crossroads

Your contact has agreed to meet you at a crossroads at midnight. Whether this is a bustling metropolis or a lonely roadside cafe (or perhaps just a collection of scrubby trees and badly maintained street lamps) you can't help but feel a frisson of nervous anticipation. What information do they have? Why meet here, of all places?

• Psychic Dead Spot. The contact chose it because a crossroads is a kind of protection against psychic intrusion and spiritual eavesdroppers. A conversation held here can't be overheard by the dead, or those who rely on ghosties and ghoulies as their eyes and ears. However, the contact is being followed by the dead so as soon as the characters leave that spot they will be picked up on, perhaps pursued. Is there a safe way of leaving a crossroads?
• Meeting of the Damned. The contact doesn't realize that this is where a particularly dangerous group of undead lurk - perhaps strigoi, perhaps even vampires. The contact doesn't realize this because the contact has been suborned, and is working with the enemy. This is a lure, a trap to get the character to meet somewhere their protections are weakest. If this is a savings throw or advantage-style game like D&D, then all saves and combat rolls are at disadvantage while the characters are within a certain distance of the crossroads. Those who can see spirits see the unhallowed dead all around them, hampering the characters' every move.
• Crossing Signals. The contact is trying to find out whether the characters are in league with the enemy. He wants to see how they behave around a crossroads, whether they're affected in any way by their proximity to the unhallowed dead. If the characters pass the test then he has valuable information for them. If they don't, he has something considerably more lethal in mind. Occult spends may be very helpful here, convincing him that he has nothing to fear.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

   

Not Quite First Impressions: The Troubleshooters (Helmgast RPG)

 

The Troubleshooters

I've been looking forward to this.

When I was a kid my folks used to get me Tintin every year for Christmas; I've still got most of them, in less than pristine condition. Trained early on in the ways of evil I soon found myself in Belgium, agog at the one shrine that should be on every comic-lovers itinerary: the Comics Art Museum. So when I discovered that some mad genius was designing an RPG based on the comics I remembered so fondly, I did what I almost never do: I backed the Kickstarter to physical reward level.

See, I know the pain of international shipping. I've known it all my life, so I almost never have anything shipped to me if I can possibly avoid it. When in doubt, I fly to the States or the UK and buy from the store, and I don't often do that. Usually I get the .pdf. 

So picture my joy when, having backed to physical, the world's shipping lanes crashed to a halt, Brexit kicked the UK's shipping timetable in the Boris Johnsons, and COVID kept us all indoors forever. I consoled myself: it will arrive eventually. One day. One far-off day.

It's here! It's finally here!

Is it fun?

Yes!

How fun?

Well, put it to you this way: it's a moderately crunchy light-hearted fantasy tourism RPG in which you, as the hero of a ligne claire style narrative, go forth and do daring deeds. This week, you're hunting a long-lost sunken U-Boat and the treasures it is said to contain. Next week, it's hunting Minoan antiquities while avoiding the minions of a mysterious group known as the Octopus. The week after that, who knows? The world is your oyster!

Speaking of, yes, it is the world, as in the world you know and have been living in for however many years. There are some minor differences, and super science lurks in the shadows with all the mutant octopi and peculiar lights in the sky that entails. Feel free to slip in some references to Atlantis or the Seven Cities of Gold - it's that kind of setting. 

However, world history is broadly the same as it is in our world. Nobody dropped an H-bomb on Berlin, and Martians have yet to land on Golders Green. Kennedy (or possibly Lyndon Johnson) is in the White House. Khrushchev (or possibly Brezhnev) is in the Kremlin. 

Light-hearted means exactly that. Tintin never went to Vietnam, so neither will you. The Cold War might be turning Africa into a blood-soaked pin map and the Belgian Congo might be a nightmare's nightmare, but you're more interested in King Solomon's Mines. Heroes might get knocked cold, but they probably won't have their guts splattered over the landscape. This is a world for Studio Ghibli, not Heavy Metal. 

The rules are moderately crunchy. If crunch-lite is something like Honey Heist, modest crunch is BRP Call of Cthulhu, and major crunch is an Avalon Hill wargame, then The Troubleshooters is probably a notch above CoC but not quite D&D 3.5, in the crunch stakes. Percentile dice, lots of d6s, and a functionally ... odd ... combat system. 

Whoever on the team best loves miniatures combat was put in charge of fight scenes. When planning one of these your first task as Director of Operations is to sketch out the scene of combat and divide it up into zones, which have a tactical impact on gameplay. A street, a sidewalk, fountain, benches, cars parked nearby, all are zones, and some are made up of more than one zone. A car, for instance, is effectively two zones: car interior, and car exterior. If you wanted to make it more complicated you could divide car interior into more than one zone, such as passenger side, driver side, back seats, effectively turning the car into five separate zones. As the game suggests, "if the terrain is boring, add more zones!" 

Eeek!

OK, maybe I'm a psychopath, but when designing a scenario I don't sit down and plan out combat moments because those usually happen without my input. A player character punches a mook, and we're off to the races. Maybe every once in a while I set up, say, a casino floor, in anticipation of a John Woo style gunfight, but that seldom happens. The last time I went to the trouble of sketching out battlemaps, never mind elaborate battlemaps, I was in Uni, and had all the time in the world. Now I have maybe an hour to scribble some notes. Damned if I'm going to pretend to be a draughtsman for the sake of a donnybrook that might last less than 10 minutes at the table.

Moreover it will have to be a sketch most of the time, since zones affect character movement and a host of other tactical considerations, so the players are going to want to see what's going on. If you're not good at sketching quickly, Hergé help you. Nothing kills the mood like ten to fifteen minutes of impromptu drawing while the players twiddle their thumbs.

But you can ignore this, if you like. 

In the combat example given in the main book using the map I described zones do come into it, but only for the first few seconds of gameplay. After that, it's a pretty straightforward smackfest. In fact, zones only become an issue in the first few seconds because the Director is a stickler when it comes to a driver leaping to the rescue over the passenger side of the car (changing zones). If the Director weren't such a stick-in-the-mud, it wouldn't be a problem. There's a brief mention of a zone later in the example, but otherwise zones don't affect the outcome at all. 

In fact the entire map, with all its zones, is completely ignored except for the little bit in between the two cars. So all that sketching went for nothing. In the example, mind you, which is meant to show off every aspect of gameplay.

Which suggests to me that you, as Director, could probably ignore sketches and zones altogether and still have a perfectly satisfactory fight scene.

There are a few odd touches like this. An entire page is devoted to the techniques of kodokan judo, both those allowed in competition and those that are not, which I thought was interesting until I realized that it had no practical effect on gameplay. It's essentially a page of flavor text.

There's a moment where the text discusses Roles Within the Team (Doer, Muscle, Investigator, Fixer, Specialist) and on the page opposite the example character Elektra shows off an eye-catching drawing of her apartment in Paris, which is the team's base of operations. Under Doer, which is the first item on the Roles list and is specifically mentioned as a team leader type, it says among other things '[the Doer] frequently controls some key asset for the team, such as their base of operations.' OK, I think, so Elektra's the Doer. Nope. On the page following, she's listed as the Muscle; Frida, an example character who doesn't get as much screen time as Elektra, is the Doer. 

That's the kind of thing that causes a head-scratching moment; it's not wrong, but it contradicts the text for no good reason, and at this point I'm hoping that everything in the examples reinforces the text. After all, why wasn't it Frida's apartment? Why isn't Elektra, the one who gets most of the screen time, the team leader character?

Then there are Plot Hooks, which are specific to a character and hook the character into a scenario. Say, Do-Gooder (You can't help it! You just have to help others.). The text says 'There are only 11 Plot Hooks. It may seem like too few, but the low number is intentional: to make sure there is guaranteed overlap between the Plot Hooks of the characters and the startup handouts in the adventure books.'

Which is a reason, but not a good reason. Again, perhaps I'm a psychopath (whoops! where's my cleaver?) but I intend to write my own scenarios most of the time. I could care less about the startup handouts in the adventure books; those are optional anyway. So why not stuff in as many Plot Hooks as you like? 

Later in the text, in the Director's section, it talks about Other Genres. 'Bande dessinée are broad and span over several genres and styles, from fantasy and history to present day to science fiction, from drama and romance to action and adventure, and yes, erotic stories too. We have focused on international mysteries and adventures in the modern era, but there's nothing stopping you from experimenting with other genres and eras.'

Shoot, why not devote a couple pages to different eras and genres? It would have been at least as interesting as a page devoted to kodokan judo. Or earlier in the text when it talks about different styles of story (curious adventurers, sleuths, agents, heists) - why not devote a page to each style, rather than a column?  

OK, I've spent enough time babbling. What do I think?

I think it's great! 

I think the overall aesthetic of the book matches the desired flavor and theme. I particularly liked the little touches, like the character portraits at the frontispiece (reminds me of Tintin) or the use of expressive symbols rather than swearing - though I also appreciated the list of period-specific curse words in the appendix. Nom d'une pipe! Cornegidouille! 

Character design is clean and well-presented, and I love the idea of having passports as character sheets - though if you think I'm ordering new ones from my friendly local game store, Helmgast, you must be off your Swedish trolley. My friendly local game store is several thousand miles across the ocean; I shall use the .pdf, thanks all the same. ;) 

I think the rules could perhaps have spent a little longer in the oven, but they do the job they're intended to do which is all that can be asked for. I particularly appreciate the use of Story Points, handing control of the narrative to the players. There are some problems with the examples given in the text, but nothing that breaks the game. For those who fear crunch, it's only slightly al dente.

I think the loving care expended on the background, replete with Weird Locations, is delightful - and yes, Helmgast, I did notice 'Skull Island, Bermuda: an island hidden in the mist, where an abandoned British destroyer from the Second World War is anchored in the lagoon.' Cheeky sods!  Bon sang de bois! Cuistre!

I like the idea of the Octopus, a villain group designed to be a source of adventures. Apart from anything else it does the same job SPECTRE did for Bond; it gave him a target to punch that wasn't the Soviet Union or any real-world government. I also like the nod to queer-coded villains in the Director's section.

The accompanying scenario, The U-Boat Mystery, is solid and gives the adventurers some globe-trotting and Nazi punching to do, which is always a good thing. I did get a chuckle when I recognized the source material, but there's nothing wrong with borrowing inspiration from anime or manga. 

Would I recommend it? Sure! It's not a bad purchase for beginning Directors and fans of the source material. I look forward to more stuff from the creators - so long as they don't expect me to draw anything!