I've recently read Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master by Paddy Hayes. I'll talk more about this on a YSDC Bookshelf, so look out for that, but today I'm going to borrow an anecdote from Park's experiences as a neophyte intelligence operative in Moscow, in the 1950s.
Park and a colleague decided to visit Kalinin, now known by its old name Tver, a medieval township not far from Moscow. The idea was to get a first-hand glimpse of the nearby air base, but they were out for whatever they could get. They arrived at the train station, wandered around and discovered
... what looked like an interesting building - interesting in that the dozen or so ground floor windows were barred. As they passed the entrance they glanced in. There was no one around but in the gloom they could make out a bank of telephones. Beside the phones were instructions telling people how to use them to denounce their neighbors. Citizens were to pick up the handset, wait for an official and then dictate their denunciation, remembering to provide full details of the guilty party. Park and Deverill stared at one another; telephones were unknown in ordinary Soviet households, so the solution was to provide a bank of phones to allow people to drop in and inform on their fellows. It must be the local KGB office, they decided ... There was no one guarding the entrance so they stepped in for a closer look ...
Things got a bit sticky from that point on.
It's relatively easy to get a Soviet-era telephone from the 1950s, but given the scarcity of such phones at the time it's likely any phone from that period comes either from a well-to-do household or from a situation like this. Banks of phones in a KGB office, with only one purpose: to help people inform on their neighbors. Whispering evil down the phone line, at any hour of the day or night.
Sympathetic magic is a process in which an otherwise inanimate object is imbued with power. It's based on the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing, which is why so many herbal remedies involve plants that physically resemble a part of the human body. It's most often seen in fiction as the voodoo doll; stick a pin in it and watch the victim dance.
Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
However you don't need intent to create a powerful totem out of an inanimate object. The yokai entity tsukumogami, from Japanese folklore, is essentially an item of clothing or tool that, over time, has come to life, developing a spirit (if not a soul) of its own. Anything that has long associations with people can develop a personality all its own.
Here you have an antique telephone, a battered old bakelite, that's been around for who knows how long. It's something you might find in an antique shop or just some weird kitsch collectables store. Or maybe it's sitting in some abandoned offices, a government facility, or maybe stacked up in a warehouse somewhere. The example I'm using is inspired by Park's story, but it could as easily have come from, say, a prison, or a military bunker. Anywhere, really.
What happens if you pick up the phone and listen?
What happens if the phone starts to ring?
I'm going to use Night's Black Agents as a base for gamification, but this is an idea that can as easily be used in Esoterrorists, Delta Green - any horror game.
All you need is a phone with a nasty history.
Supernatural: vampires are the result of magical or other supernatural activities on Earth; spirits, ghosts, witchcraft and the like. Want to talk with the dead? This can help, but it's a party line so expect frequent interruptions from Heaven only knows who. Think of it as a medium's planchette, except you need a generous helping of blood to make it work. Sinner's blood, for preference. The blacker the sins, the better the result. Vampires sometimes use these phones to communicate with others in the network, since this is one telephone line mortal investigators can't tap. As vampires are effectively 'dead' as far as the telephone's concerned a vampire can easily talk to another vampire, but it's completely useless for talking with anyone else in the network - a Renfield, say.
Damned: Vampires are the work of Satan or other explicitly demonic creatures opposed to mankind and God. Those who know how can use these hideous reminders of times best forgotten as a means of enhanced interrogation. The remorseless voice on the other end of the line keeps probing, probing. It knows what you have done. You can't save yourself. The only way to earn mercy is to confess ... Treat this as +1 Maneuver in a Thrilling Interrogation challenge, boosted to +2 if the voice on the other end of the line is a dead friend. Agents can use this device if they know how, but doing so is a 5 Difficulty Stability check.
Alien: Vampires are alien beings, or earthly beings who nevertheless follow different laws of physics. It looks like a telephone. It acts like a telephone. It seems so normal. And yet ... and yet ... The chief advantage of a device like this is, if you know how, it can talk to the past. It can't talk to anyone before its creation date, so a phone made in 1952 can't talk to someone in 1951. Nor can it talk to anyone after its disconnection date, so a phone disconnected in 1978 can't talk to anyone from 1980. However, within those constraints it can talk to anyone you like - so long as you know what their phone number would have been. Of course, sometimes the past calls you, for reasons best not to think about.
Mutant: Vampires are earthly beings infected or changed by (or into) some freak of nature. It might look like a telephone but that's clearly organic material in there. It's some kind of hybrid, patchwork relic, and it might be capable of thought. Probably not any more intelligent than a baby, which does raise the unsettling question of where the vampires got that organic material from. Used by Nodes to talk to other Nodes, and is capable of interfacing with computer networks, though the results are unpredictable.
There is a former stables on Cato Street near Edgeware Road in London that is the last reminder of a forgotten conspiracy against the state.
In 1820 a group of desperate men gathered there on the night of February 23rd to put their plot into motion. Their goal was to wipe out the Cabinet, start a glorious revolution and install themselves as leaders of same, at Mansion House. They called themselves the Spencean Philanthropists, after the radical (and bookseller) Thomas Spence and their target was the home of Lord Harrowby, where the Cabinet was supposed to be meeting for dinner. With all their victims in one place, it would be easy to destroy the hated politicians and Lordships who stood in their way.
Unfortunately for them the Philanthropists had a spy in their midst, and their plans were well known. The dinner party was a fiction, intended to lure them out into the open. Some of them were immediately arrested when the loft of the stables was invaded by police; one of the policemen was stabbed to death, and those conspirators not caught at Cato Street were nabbed in the days following, as the authorities rounded up the Philanthropist's leadership.
It was a triumph for the Bow Street Runners, who were first on the scene. They were meant to be backed up by a detachment from the Coldstream Guards, but the troopers got lost on the way to the conspiracy so the Runners made the assault themselves.
Five of the Philanthropists were condemned to death and the rest transported to Australia. The executions were unusual; as traitors, the five were condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but their sentence was commuted to hanging and beheading. Their heads, once cut off, were displayed to the watching crowd and then flung into the coffins with their bodies.
Radicals: Fascist, Communist, foreign, Irish, Jewish, what-have-you. The radical has wild eyes and a tendency to hairiness – combs and razors being apparently tools of oppression. Dressed in solidarity with the working class, or in something cheap and warm, the radical carries his (or her) pamphlets, émigré newspapers, manifestos, and grudges wherever she (or he) goes. He (or she) mostly goes to drafty lodge halls, noisy protest meetings, sympathetic art happenings, or cheap tea shops. The only thing she (or he) hates more than The Class System (or the Jews, or the Bankers, or the Arms Merchants) is people who hate it incorrectly ... [Bookhounds p 55-6].
It's alleged that the leader of this so-called Philanthropic group sells books and radical pamphlets out of a stall in High Holborn, and can often be found near Tottenham Court Market. That may or may not be so. What is certain is that this group went from ignominious nobodies to public enemies in one fell swoop, when they made an explosive attempt of the life of the Earl of Harrowby. This attempt failed, but several were wounded and one innocent bystander, an employee of Coutt's bank, killed. The Philanthropists claimed responsibility and signed the note they sent to the papers with the name Arthur Thistlewood. Thistlewood was one of the Cato Street conspirators hung and beheaded, the other four being Richard Tidd, James Ings, William Davidson and John Brunt.
According to those who claim to know these things the core group consists of these five, with a wider net of informants, rough lads and sympathizers. They claim to be working towards the Rights of Man, with the aim of overthrowing the ruling class and establishing themselves as the new power.
Those with occult leanings understand the Philanthropists' goal to be slightly more esoteric. They point to the Philanthropists' original target, the Earl of Harrowby, as proof. Why should an otherwise undistinguished member of the aristocracy be their first target? It seems nonsensical, until a connection is drawn between the current Earl and the target of the original Cato Street conspirators, in 1820. Also, they seem obsessed with obtaining relics of the original conspirators, and are currently searching for the knife hangman John Foxton is supposed to have used to cut off the heads of the Cato Street five.
Moreover the potter's field in which the conspirators may have been buried, severed heads and all, has been targeted by graverobbers. At the time nobody understood why anyone would bother, but those who ought to know claim that the Philanthropists are very interested in recovering the heads of the original five. Though it's understood that this attempt, like the assassination, did not succeed - possibly because the heads were never there to begin with. A collector of medical curiosities, Arthur Scroggins, claims to have those fateful heads pickled in jars, part of a gruesome collage. Nobody believes he has the real thing - except possibly those Philanthropists ...
Recently the booksellers Henry Sotheran, who you may recall from their hosting of a Bookhounds play session, tweeted a cri de coeur:
This micro RPG is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but I wanted to draw your attention to it both as Bookhounds fodder and also as a means of establishing a setting.
Just drink in the inevitable grind into poverty of spirit and purse. There's only one possible way to make money: roll a 1, 2 or 3 (a customer! A CUSTOMER!) and then roll a 6 (purchases book). That's it. Every other option on the board costs you something. It might be patience, time, or (God forbid) money, but it's all cost, all the way down. After 10 days of this, your landlord demands their rent.
While Bookhounds is about running a bookshop, there aren't many mechanics for the actual shop beyond its credit rating and some helpful advice to let the players describe the shop and its working day. Ultimately the shop takes a back seat to all the Mythos creepiness infesting London. When your characters cross swords (metaphorically or otherwise) with, say, the Keirecheires, the last thing on their minds is whether or not someone made sure a plumber came in to unblock the shop toilet. Even though the stinking gusher from said toilet might be the reason why they don't make rent that month.
This is a mistake. If the game's about running a shop, then the shop is a character in its own right - and retail has its demons, far more dangerous and hideous than any interstellar squid person who keeps hitting the snooze button on their alarm.
I've mentioned Orwell before. I'm going to mention Orwell again, and also this Forgotten London post about Pubs, and could probably name a few dozen Ephemera posts before I was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to sanity. The point I'm trying to make, and seem to have been making for a very long time, is twofold.
First, conflict is the engine of plot.
Second, retail is nothing but conflict from the moment the first staff member cracks open the front door in the frosty morning, to the darkened shadows of evening when someone flips the signage from Open to Closed and starts cashing up the till.
Sure, you can have a game that's all about chasing squid monsters and giving them a darn good wedgie. In a sense, that's what squid monsters are for.
But you've played that game before. A dozen times or more. Surely it's getting a little ... stale?
Let's tweak this micro RPG and bring in a mechanic I used once upon a time in the Great War supplement Flying Coffins: sacrificing Stability to survive.
In Flying Coffins I gave the option of letting players whose aircraft were damaged in combat exchange Stability for Health. The idea being, if your crate is shot down you're dead, so why not spend Stability to ensure it stays in the air? Sure, you're sacrificing long-term health for short-term gain, but why wouldn't you when the alternative is burning alive ten thousand feet up?
In the micro RPG the player sacrifices time, patience, and possibly money to keep on playing, until the point comes when they no longer have the time, patience or money to continue. Then the day ends. Ten cycles of that, and the game ends. Again, the point is sacrificing long-term health for short-term gain, the difference being that in the micro RPG it's all down to a die roll. It's not a player-facing system, which is perhaps the point: retail isn't a heroic business. It's a daily grind in which you, the retailer, have little to no control over your fate.
Well, Trail has a mechanic that's all about sacrifice: Stability. Often Stability is expressed in terms of raw horror: you lose Stability either because you encountered something horrible, like a gouged-out eye, or because you encountered an element of the Mythos, like a Fire Vampire.
But retail has its own horrors. The micro RPG lists a few; if you've worked in retail you can probably think of a dozen more without too much effort. You could write a book about customers alone, and some have. There are significant portions of Reddit devoted to stories you can turn into RPG fodder.
For those of you asking 'should I be spending Stability to stay in business?' the answer is, obviously, No. You should be spending Sanity. However, since you can get Stability back but Sanity, once spent, is gone forever, out of the kindness of my heart I'm suggesting Stability as a pool instead.
Moreover I highly recommend getting out of the mindset that Stability is only for the spooky heeblie-jeeblies. Life stresses us in all sorts of ways without putting on the Scooby Doo rubber mask. There ought to be a means of expressing this in-game, and Stability spends are a convenient way of doing that.
Mechanically, I would express this as follows:
At least once a week, each working week, there's a crisis. It doesn't really matter what the crisis is, for the purpose of describing this mechanic; all that matters is, it's a crisis, and needs to be dealt with urgently - but that's spilt milk under the bridge, as Jeremy Irons has been known to remark.
In order to deal with this crisis, one or more of the characters needs either to pass a Stability test, or sacrifice two Stability. Failing the test means losing 3 Stability.
Alternatively the players can ignore the crisis, but that means it isn't dealt with. If they ignore 2 or more crises, or they fail a Stability test 2 or more times, then the shop suffers a Reversal for the month and its Credit Rating goes down the pan. This has consequential knock-on effects for the longevity of the shop as a business. Too many Reversals and it's back to running a barrow under a bridge in the Isle of Dogs, or wherever it is booksellers go to die.
The intent is this: the players should always feel under pressure. Their usual adventures bring them into contact with the outré on a very regular basis. That means their Stability is already under threat, so they might want to ignore a crisis and retain their Stability. However, if they ignore too many crises then the shop suffers.
At the same time each character may feel it prudent to pass the risk on to someone else. It shouldn't be them who takes the test, or sacrifices 2 Stability. It should be someone else. Anyone else. Which inevitably means a few minutes of furious infighting, as the characters decide amongst themselves who gets to deal with the tedious bore of a customer who just walked in the door, unblocks the sink, does the taxes or otherwise deals with whatever-it-is that has the shop in an uproar.
This can only lead to wonderful things.
Always remember, conflict is the engine of plot, and retail is nothing but conflict, morning, noon, and night.
Three cheers to Henry Sotheran's and all who toil in retail's service!
The Tower: disaster, destruction, upheaval, trauma, sudden change, chaos, when upright. From Labyrinthos: The Tower is a symbol for the ambition that is constructed on faulty premises. The destruction of the tower must happen in order to clear out the old ways and welcome something new. Its revelations can come in a flash of truth or inspiration ... The old ways are no longer useful, and you must find another set of beliefs, values and processes to take their place.
What can you do with the Third Act - the Resolution?
What can the agent expect?
To begin with, all the minor players should be off the board by this point. In the Confrontation, as indicated by the III of Pentacles (inverted), multiple groups and powerful individuals were vying for possession of the McGuffin. That led to conflict, and conflict is the engine of plot - but it also crowded the board. Ultimately this is a confrontation between your agent and the Conspiracy, not your agent, the Conspiracy, the KGB, the CIA, the Pope, and your best friend's mum, even if she does happen to be the best bang-and-burner in the business.
Perhaps one or two minor players step in to complicate the Resolution, or perhaps the after-effects of their actions still resonate. Even so, anyone who isn't a vampire or joining the Conspiracy should be out of the way at this point. Some of them may be messily out of the way, and that's fine. One or two could be feral vampires, or ghouls, or what-have-you. That's also fine. What they cannot be is independent actors with direct influence on the narrative.
So that bang-and-burner might have left a bomb behind that will go off in the final scene, complicating that scene. What she won't be doing is interfering in that scene and snatching the McGuffin. Why? Because that leads to a downbeat ending where the agent not only doesn't win, but also doesn't make the Conspiracy lose. Any ending that results in the main character becoming a third wheel in their own story is a bad ending.
Now, as we're letting the cards guide us we know that the Tower suggests that the Conspiracy's ambition - whatever it may be - is based on faulty premises. What does that mean for the plot? It means that even if the Conspiracy has the McGuffin and intends to use it for the Conspiracy's final victory, it will not work as expected.
Let's look at an example: recent Netflix K-Horror zombie apocalypse series All Of Us Are Dead.
In that series - and this isn't a spoiler, it appears in the first few minutes of the very first episode - a scientist comes up with a virus which he thinks is a miracle drug that will give his son the strength he needs to stand up to school bullies who are making his life a misery. In fact, what that scientist ends up doing is creating a zombie virus that, despite his best efforts, spirals out of control, as zombie viruses are wont to do.
That's the Tower in a nutshell. The plan was to create a mind control toxin, and it ends up creating flesh-eating zombies instead. The plan was to launch a rocket that would bring the Russian satellite system under Conspiracy control, and instead the rocket is spiraling towards Paris. The plan was to use the magic ritual to summon Death, and instead they got Dream.
What this means for the agent is they still have the same basic problem to solve; they need to get the McGuffin away from the Conspiracy. However, if the agent should fail then the Conspiracy's plan doesn't work as intended. The next few episodes could have the agent running one step ahead of a zombie apocalypse, or in a 24-style race against time to stop Paris from going up in a cinder, or a supernatural break-in to rescue Dream. If the agent should not only fail but also fall, then it's the next character's job to do those things.
Mechanically, if the agent is laboring under conditions that will kill them if not resolved, then the Resolution is their final chance to deal with, say, that vampire bite, or the internal bleeding, or the zombie virus. There ought to be a clear chance to do so, and the agent should know going in what they have to do to make that happen.
Don't fall into the temptation of making it a false rumor, 'your princess is in another castle' moment. As Director you must always be scrupulously fair. Make it difficult to get by all means, but the time for red herrings is over and done.
One possibility is to make it an either/or situation. The agent has a chance to get the zombie virus cure that will save their life, but to get it they have to let the Conspiracy's agent escape. Or they can kill the Conspiracy's agent, but inevitably succumb to the zombie virus.
By this point the agent has probably burned most if not all their Edges and Pushes, and the Difficulty for most tests will be high. So don't put too many tests between the agent and that final resolution, but make sure the tests they do face keep them on the edge of their seats.
Also, it's a good idea not to repeat story beats. If the agent already had an exciting car chase to get here, then don't have another exciting car chase. It will inevitably feel stale. An exciting gun battle, but only if there hasn't already been an exciting gun battle, and so on. The final moment should always be something new, something exotic. Holmes didn't battle Moriarty on the streets of London; he tracked the Napoleon of Crime to the Reichenbach Falls, where they had a confrontation between titans.
Going back to the cards for a moment, I suggested in the first of these posts that the player ought to have the option of using one in a free Push. That carries through, so in the Confrontation the agent might use the III of Pentacles (inverted) as a Push. Here we have the Tower. Bearing in mind that the agent has probably burned through most if not all of their advantages by now, that free Push is looking pretty special. But how to use it? A flash of inspiration, perhaps, or maybe that bang-and-burner's bomb sweeps the board clear. However, the Director should insist on fairly strict interpretation, since this is a Push that might make or break the entire narrative. Of course, if the agent can't come up with something then the Director can claim that card for herself ...
That's it! Next time, something completely different.
