Let's Flip A Target (Night's Black Agents)

 Flip. The agents must flip an asset to their side.

Briefly: the Bankhaus is an investment bank with a murky past and has offices in several major cities, of which the Conspiracy has control over the Paris and Zürich branches thanks to its control over Lisle Klingemann, daughter of the boss and a senior partner in her own right, and Albert Ahrens, controller of the Zürich branch and Lisle's devoted slave. The Bankhaus is mainly interested in software development companies, particularly in jurisdictions within Europe, though it has a significant sideline in mining, especially in East Asia, a holdover from its former interests.

It has swanky offices, lawyers, a ton of assets on the book and off, and when it makes calls they get answered by senior politicians and members of the financial elite. It almost doesn't matter whether this is a Supernatural, Damned, Alien or Mutant game; all factions are going to want a piece of the Bankhaus whether to get access to its bottomless bank vaults or for more esoteric reasons.

The Flip has the potential to be the most interesting operation your agents will ever conduct as it relies on in-depth knowledge of the target, which means Investigation, Investigation and more Investigation with a healthy dose of psychology thrown in.

Some agents Flip themselves, offering their secrets for money or some other reward. Brian Regan, the spy who couldn't spell, is a classic example. He deliberately gathered intel he thought would be valuable and tried to sell it to the Russians via the Lybians. It didn't go well. However, that's the kind of traitor who has his motivations baked in - Regan wanted cash to settle his debts and boost his pension. In situations like these the Flip becomes a Thrilling Interrogation where the agents don't know if the person presenting themselves as an asset is or isn't a poison pill. Are they secretly working for the enemy? Have they been given bogus intel?

MICE - Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. That's what gets people motivated to sell their souls. Faustus is a classic Ego trip heavily laced with Money and a small dash of Ideology. We all remember what happened to Faustus, right?

The Globe

What that suggests is that any Flip operation ought to involve a significant dose of more than one motivator. You might get to the target through Ego, and then apply Coercion. Or start with Ideology and move on to Money. People are complex little beasts; you can seldom rely on one tactic to unlock all their defenses.

The Resource Guide has this to say about Flip operations:

To make a Flip work, give it a strong, clearly defined structure – the target will flip if the Agents complete objectives X, Y, and Z – and allay any worries by tying this to core clues. Give them a chance to meet the target early on and use Bullshit Detector or let them gather intel with Electronic Surveillance or some other Investigative ability that gives them a clear signal that the Flip is viable. 

Applying the Rule of Four I would go one step further and say you want Four potential ways in, each to be followed by a Thrilling [insert sequence here]. Fortunately with MICE you have four ways in right at the start which should make life much easier for you.

Let's head over to the Bankhaus.

It almost doesn't matter who we pick for the Flip but let's say for the sake of argument that it's someone close either to Albert or to Lisle. A personal assistant, a bodyguard, maybe one of Albert's Lisle-a-likes who doesn't realize what the job she's applying for entails. 

Whoever this person is they're close enough to the inner circle to have access to all sorts of secrets, including names and contact information for significant parts of the Node, password access to important parts of the Node network, blueprints or prototype software for Achilles, that sort of thing. The Flip target gets the agents one step closer to the McGuffin.

 

Accepting all this, let's say the Flip target is a new hire at Kube Group who thought this would be a big step up for them but find themselves locked out of the Group's high-level projects. The asset doesn't know why this is so, just that it's so.

This could happen for all sorts of reasons but let's say for the sake of this example that it's because the Bankhaus doesn't want them anywhere near Project Achilles as they're astute enough to work out what's really going on. If the Bankhaus had been consulted before the hire they would have vetoed it but contracts were being signed by the time Lisle realized the new hire was a significant risk. Now Lisle's using her influence with Kube Group to sideline the new hire while they work out a means of safely terminating them without incurring a lawsuit.

The new hire: Erika Donnadieu, software engineer and former convent girl/nun-in-training (possibly why the Conspiracy wanted nothing to do with her). Intelligent and extrovert, with a strong moral center. The kind of person who, when they find a wallet full of cash in the street, immediately turn it in to the police. She's never been to the satellite operation in Rome but she knows it's located in a former nunnery which seems very odd to her. It's not as if anyone's upgraded the electrics since 1953, never mind the plumbing. 

Money:  Erika doesn't need or desire cash but her deadbeat brother Quennell is a gambling addict who's always one bad day away from disaster. Thrills: Gambling. Get Quennell utterly toasted and Erika will step in to save him.

Ideology: Erika's still a staunch Catholic even though she stepped away from the nunnery. If the agents can convince her they're acting on behalf of the Church she'll listen. Thrills: Negotiation, with a heavy emphasis on religion. Maybe it's time to work on that Mysterious Monseigneur disguise.

Coercion: Erika stepped away from her religious training because of her sexuality which is still a closely guarded secret. Not even her family knows the truth. Thrills: Trailing. The agents will have to do a lot of work to uncover her hidden personality.

Ego: Erika really doesn't appreciate her bosses giving her the runaround. Who do they think they are? Who do they think she is? Thrills: Hacking. If they can beat Erika in a Hackathon contest run by ParisTech, thus proving their skills, and then suggest that she could make her bosses pay through the nose for insulting her ability ...

The reverse of a Flip is a Protect. The agents have an asset they want to keep from being flipped by the enemy. Let's say in this instance that Erika doesn't work for Kube Group, that she works for an agency the agents are allied with (Edom, say) and the agents become aware that emissaries from Kube Group backed by the Bankhaus are trying to lure Erika away.

The exact same structure can be repurposed. So the Thrills: Gambling can now be an attempt to keep Quennell out of trouble, the Thrills: Negotiation works exactly the same way right down to the Monseigneur disguise and so on.

The significant difference is that where a Flip operation is something that might pass under the radar and not attract Conspyramid retaliation, a Protect operation definitely will. The Conspiracy is actively trying to achieve an objective and will definitely use supernatural means if the need presents itself. At a bare minimum some kind of Reflex will be in play to keep the agents occupied and it will probably be a supernatural or otherworldly Reflex of some kind.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Let's Play A Game (Night's Black Agents)

Roundabout p. 187 of the NBA main book Ken Hite starts talking about possible scenarios, and gives nine active scenario examples:

•     Destroy. The agents must destroy the local conspiracy apparat.
•     Flip. The agents must flip an asset to their side.
•     Heist. The agents must steal something
•     Hit. The agents must kill someone
•     Hunt. The agents must find someone.
•     Rescue. The agents must rescue someone.
•     Sneak. The agents must infiltrate a secure location.
•     Trace. The agents must find something, possibly something that went missing long ago.
•     Uncover. The agents must uncover a mystery.

Each scenario type can be reversed so a Destroy operation can become a Protect operation in which the agents have to defend something of theirs against enemy action.

I thought it might be interesting to discuss each operation in turn, using Bankhaus Klingemann of Bonn as the subject in each case. The Bankhaus is a Node I've developed before and if you're interested in knowing more about it I recommend the previous post. 

Briefly: the Bankhaus is an investment bank with a murky past and has offices in several major cities, of which the Conspiracy has control over the Paris and Zürich branches thanks to its control over Lisle Klingemann, daughter of the boss and a senior partner in her own right, and Albert Ahrens, controller of the Zürich branch and Lisle's devoted slave. The Bankhaus is mainly interested in software development companies, particularly in jurisdictions within Europe, though it has a significant sideline in mining, especially in East Asia, a holdover from its former interests.

It has swanky offices, lawyers, a ton of assets on the book and off, and when it makes calls they get answered by senior politicians and members of the financial elite. It almost doesn't matter whether this is a Supernatural, Damned, Alien or Mutant game; all factions are going to want a piece of the Bankhaus whether to get access to its bottomless bank vaults or for more esoteric reasons.

Let's talk Destroy.

Destroy assumes that the target has something that can be blown up, burnt down or otherwise wiped out, preferably in an impressive display of pyrotechnics. It also assumes that people are going to die or be ruined in some way, either because they end up in jail for a very long time or are otherwise taken off the board and put in a position where they can't return. 

Sony Pictures

Often this involves some kind of Infiltration. This may be an Infiltration in plain sight where the agents have to get access to, say, the Embassy Party by pretending to be guests and wait staff, or it can be the more usual kind of infiltration where the agents sneak in under cover of darkness.

It usually doesn't involve psychological or mystery tropes. As a rule, a Destroy scenario has a clear objective which has an identifiable value. It may be a bogus objective - your princess is in another castle - but the agents know at the start that the objective exists and can be found. 

It doesn't have to involve outright violence. Bond's Casino Royale is basically a Destroy scenario in which Bond is tasked with beating Le Chiffre at Baccarat, because Le Chiffre has been embezzling from his bosses and it's hoped that if Bond wipes him out the bosses will wipe out Le Chiffre. This works so long as your agents enjoy the kind of specialist play that the scenario demands. Thrilling Infiltration, say, or Thrilling Digital Intrusion. 

Double agents often provide spice to the narrative; in Navarone one of the team is revealed to be working for the enemy. This is problematic for the Director. Either one of the players has to be the double agent, which is fine up to a point but can cause group conflict out of game as well as in it, or one of the NPCs has to be the double. You can't over-use this idea, or the agents will distrust every single NPC they come across. It works best in Mirror-style games where the idea of betrayal is baked in.

Apply the Rule of Four to this and all scenario types. Four characteristics of this Destroy scenario which you can bring into play at any time. More than four and you will start to lose track.

Kreis 1:  Albert Ahrens has a home in Zürich's old town which he's kept carefully off the company books. He's owned it for more than thirty years and there are some dire secrets buried under those floorboards, secrets that he'd do anything to keep out of the light of day. Not least of which is his latest Lisle-a-like, who's undergoing psychological torture so she can better fill her role. Her predecessor is one of the things buried under the floorboards.

Slush Fund: Lisle keeps a special fund for her frequent, illicit trips to casinos. It's hidden under the company books as a special investment fund, the Raptors, and each Raptor holds the debts of the previous Raptor on its books as assets. Currently there are more Raptors than even the company accountants can keep track of and one of these days a whistleblower will make hay with them. Lisle isn't as clever about money as she thinks she is; she relies on bluff and a reputation for financial infallibility to keep the Raptors off the radar. 

Project Achilles: The Bankhaus is deeply vested in a French software development company, a start-up with a stellar reputation but not - yet - much in the way of product. The jewel in the crown is something called Project Achilles, a new kind of vulnerability testing software specifically designed to defend against resource stealing. It's garnered a lot of attention and several governments are thinking of buying into it. The firm, Kube Group, has its main offices in Paris with representation in Monaco, but for some reason it has a satellite installation in Rome - nobody knows why.

Tracfin: Allegedly the Traitement du renseignement et action contre les circuits financiers clandestins, France's intelligence service dedicated to defending against money laundering, is interested in the Bankhaus. This isn't exactly news; Tracfin is interested in pretty much everything that goes on in the financial world. What isn't nearly as widely known is that Lisle has infiltrated Tracfin and is using it against her company's rivals. Lisle's contact within Tracfin, senior investigator Claude Leroy, is rapidly becoming a Renfield and is Conspiracy-knowledgeable but doesn't have a way in other than through Lisle. Leroy can use Law and Heat to make life very difficult for the agents, and if necessary can brand them as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers to get the heavy mob involved.

With those Four Things the agents have at least two potential avenues of attack. They can ruin either Lisle or Albert by exposing their secrets, or they can Destroy valuable assets by going after the Kube Group's assets in Paris or that mysterious satellite in Rome. Any of these targets could weaken the Node if they were taken out. Meanwhile in addition to any resources the Node might have in its own right it also has that willing stooge at Tracfin who can up the agent's Heat or get the heavy mob involved, perfectly legally. All this is before any supernatural assets get in on the action.

Potential scenario locations include Paris and Zürich with a side trip to Rome or Monaco, if the agents feel like it. As Director you'd want to at least have a surface understanding of all those locations - nothing fancy, just a quick-and-dirty. 

The agents get to pick for themselves exactly how they Destroy the target. 

Now, let's flip this over and look at it as a Protect scenario. What exactly are the agents protecting from Bankhaus Klingemann?

They could be protecting allies within the French government or software development or the financial sector. The Bankhaus would be interested in Destroying any of these and have the tools to do so. Alternatively, the agents could have allies or assets within the Bankhaus or Kube Project itself that need protecting. After all, Lisle has an interfering brother who might be a crucial asset, or there could be a whistleblower in Kube Group providing valuable intel about that mysterious project in Rome.

The Four Things remain exactly the same. The difference is, if the agents go after any of these Four Things it's not to Destroy them necessarily; it's to Protect whatever asset needs defending. So the Kube Group insider, let's say, is Protected when Uncle Albert has to deflect attention from that peculiar house of his, or Lisle has to hide her gambling debts. Perhaps Lisle's brother Eric will breathe easier when Claude Leroy is out of the way. 

In any event the point I'm getting at is this: the terrain does not change whether it's a Destroy or Protect operation. What changes is the objective. Which means you can re-use the same terrain as a Protect scenario even if it was written as a Destroy scenario, if there's reason for you to do so.

This is something you should always strive for no matter what system you're writing for. Never kill yourself with work, particularly if it's the kind of work that nobody but you will ever see. Instead make sure that the scene, asset, or whatever it may be, can be used multiple ways for multiple reasons.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Not Quite Book Review Corner: Mick Herron (Night's Black Agents)

via Waterstones

Mick Herron's Slough House series, a must-read for Night's Black Agents players and Directors alike, has two major themes that it rams home again and again.

1. The English are their own worst enemy.
2. Boris Johnson is an arsehole.

Which is fair enough so far as it goes. I don't think anyone would disagree with point 1. Point 2 depends largely on whether you believe Boris is a Blofeld or an idiot. Or both, but personally I lean towards idiot and have done for many years. For that reason I think Herron gives Johnson too much credit.  

The Slough House series is set in modern Britain of the mid-to-late 2010s. It presumes there is a dead letter office for spies, Slough House, where the cack-handed and past-it are sent to while away the days waiting for retirement. Its nominal leader is Jackson Lamb, a cold warrior whose glory days are so far behind him you couldn't see them with a telescope. He's the anti-Bond, charmless and bullying, who somehow manages to get things done despite everything. Underneath him are an ever-changing band of misfits. One or two may drop off the twig from book to book, but Slough House survives.

Despite being a spy series unlike a le Carré narrative nearly all the action takes place in London. The George Smiley lookalike is dead by his own hand after selling Her Maj's secrets to the Russians, and the current leadership is more Judi Dench M than anything else. Though you presume all these actual spies doing real jobs over at Park House - the ones who haven't been shitcanned to Slough House - have adventures in foreign lands, the ones at Slough House are lucky if they get a day trip to the Barbican which, as it happens, is right next door.

The main antagonist of the series is Joris Bohnson, aka Peter Judd, who crops up again and again in several different roles across the series. He doesn't have it in for Slough House per se, at least not in the early books (I haven't read the entire series). However, his latest wheeze always seems to involve Jackson's lambs somehow, whether on the periphery or as the main event.

Herron had a very tedious trick in his first novel, Slow Horses, which I'm glad to say he has dropped. Slow Horses revolves around a kidnapping by a British terror group, BNP-adjacent white supremacists who've decided to execute a British Pakistani Muslim in retribution for some tedious thing or other. In that novel Herron would strongly suggest in the narrative that X has happened when in fact it was Y, and when Y is revealed Herron does a little dance to show how clever he has been. This misdirection is fun once. Fun twice. On the three-hundred and forty-ninth repetition it gets wearisome. 

Thankfully he does not overuse it in the other Slough House novels. 

He does do one thing he deserves praise for: he mentions Brexit. Not by name. Rather like Yog-Sothoth, Brexit must not be named. However, it does turn up as a plot point, which is something I've not seen other authors working in modern-day settings do. 

Real Tigers has a plot device that Night's Black Agents Directors, and possibly Dracula Dossier Directors, ought to steal. Without giving the game away, the device is this: the British Secret Service keeps what it calls Grey Books, a series of files about conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. They do this for two reasons. First, the people who believe that the Queen was in fact a Reptilian are sometimes one Armalite away from doing something tragic. Second, there might (just might) be some useful intel in there somewhere. 

The villains of the piece want those Grey Books and coerce Slough House into getting it for them.

The Grey Books are plausible. You can imagine every intelligence service keeping something like them, and there are real-world examples. In Night's Black Agents there's every reason to think those Grey Books contain useful intel about everyone's favorite conspiracy theory: the vampires that secretly Rule The World. They'd be prime targets for every Night's Black Agents group and the great thing about it is, every national government would have something like those Grey Books. You don't have to restrict this to a London setting. It could as easily be the Vatican, or France's DSGE, or German's BND. 

To that end:

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright     

Your tiger team is tasked with breaking into the national intelligence agency's archives and stealing the Grey Books, their version of the nutjob files. Every conspiracy theory that gained traction is in there. It's considered a relatively safe thing to steal; not exactly the crown jewels of the nation's security secrets, but important enough to be kept behind a door with more than one lock.

Your supposed Mr. Johnson (no, not that Johnson) is a high-ranking politician who wants to tweak the tail of the security services. They think that embarrassing the current Head of Security will get them leverage in their latest political scheme. What Mr. Johnson doesn't realize is that his second-in-command has personal reasons for wanting that file and will take the first opportunity to steal it from the group.  

That leaves the agents swinging in the wind. Mr. Johnson, seeing how his scheme has fallen apart, will deny all knowledge. Hire a tiger team to test national security services? Never! Not our Mr. Johnson. Meanwhile the second-in-command is in the wind and the agents are effectively on the run - unless they can somehow get that file back. Even if they do, will they be able to buy their way back into the government's good graces or are they permanently ruined?

On top of all this: just what's in that nutjob file that everyone seems to want so badly?  

He Who Wields The Knife (RPG All, Serpentine)

They’re having a leadership contest over in the UK, don’t know if you noticed. A couple of has-beens are racing to become captain of the Titanic. One, Rishi Sunak, is known to have been jockeying for position behind Boris Johnson’s back before the leadership contest even kicked off. That seems to have given his rival Liz Truss the advantage, under the old political cliché ‘He who wields the knife never wears the crown.’ 

Although the phrasing is Michael Heseltine’s – he who famously drove a stake through Maggie Thatcher’s political career – the sentiment is one for the ages. It’s a generally accepted truth in coups, revolutions, and Shakespearean tragedies that the people who kick off the shooting match by taking direct action at the leadership do not survive the weeks, months or years of chaos that follows. Either the powers that be retain control, in which event there are bloody reprisals, or the knife-wielder ends up everyone’s target in the ensuing melee. 

Oddly enough it’s a factor that you’ve seen play out yourself more than once, though you may not have realized it at the time. In every competitive game you’ve ever played there has always been a point where one player is clearly in the lead, at which point every other player joins forces to bring the leader down. Even those who clearly have no hope of winning themselves start cooperating with those who do, or might.

Of course, if you wield the knife you might at least be remembered, as Richard III has been remembered. Buried under a car park, mind you, but remembered nonetheless. Whether the annals of history matter to you while the worms gnaw your desiccated remains is a matter for conjecture.

Knife follows knife, more often than not. Julius Caesar famously crossed the Rubicon and defeated Pompey Magnus in civil war, only to die at the hands of men who themselves died on the battlefield.  Robespierre saw Louis XVI to the guillotine and himself ended up under the guillotine, but he was not the last so to die. 

In RPG settings there’s a lot to be gained from bloody revolution. It’s an excellent plot hook and motivates action. Of course, the characters are likely to be on the sidelines at first, perhaps hired by [INSERT NPC HERE] to be one of the Act 3 Scene 3 Murderers. Or perhaps something else, but whatever their actual role adventurers are used to being hired by someone else to Do A Thing.

If this were Night’s Black Agents, for example, it is definitely in keeping for the agents to be hired by [WHOEVER] to Destroy, Hit, Flip, Heist, or whatever it may be. They may not realize, or care, that they’re working for vampires, at least not at first. A job is a job, after all.

The problem comes when they’re forced to realize that it’s not just a job. That the Heist they were paid to take on was carried out in furtherance of someone else’s scheme. That the Nodes at Tier 2 of the pyramid are looking hungrily at the undead at Tier 1 and wondering if they have what it takes to overthrow the leadership. To become Caliph instead of the Caliph.

After all, if he who wields the knife seldom wears the crown, what do you think happens to the lackeys of he who wields the knife? Shakespeare doesn't even tell you what happens to the murderers in Macbeth. It probably isn't pleasant but if Shakespeare can't even be bothered to say 'dead in a ditch' - well, that's just rude.

An alternative which puts the players at the heart of the action is to have them being the ones actively seeking power. Cyberpunk 2020 or Cyberpunk RED has an obvious means of making this work: have the characters be important executives in a corporation. Probably a smallish one; not Arasaka, but maybe a weapons supplier or manufacturer. A corporation that might be bought out by one of its competitors. That way the characters have a honeypot to reach for: being the ones with all the shares when the white knight swoops in with cash in hand.

Swords of the Serpentine has a section in the early part of the book that talks about a similar group concept: the Family Business. I’m going to quote that section here:

You may be a prestigious member of the Ancient Nobility, the merchant princes behind a major Mercanti guild, or even a close-knit family of commoners who have taken up a life of crime. For you, family is everything — and when family and friends get threatened by personal or political enemies, you turn to heroics to get your own back. This style of game deals with family politics and social pressure as much as external threats; you may have just slipped into a rival’s office to poison their wine, but is that going to make your mother proud of you?

In Serpentine the Noble Houses can be powerful, influential, wealthy – but it’s just as likely that they’re decayed husks of their former glory. Yes, they have property and titles, but no, they have nothing of actual value. Plenty of glory, and no bread to eat.

With that in mind:

The Gritti Saga

The characters are either members of the family proper, or part of the mansion staff. Perhaps they even hold a meaningless title – Keeper of the Falcons, when there hasn’t been a bird in the coop for decades. Or Nanny, in a house with no babies. The Grittis have a splendid history and plenty of property deeds for houses and ships that either no longer exist or are well out of reach. A squatter’s haven in Sag Harbor that used to be a Gritti shipbuilder, or concession rights to a particular business that has long since been carved up by rivals who care not a snap for rights on paper when they have the rights in practice.

At the top of this tree is Tomaso Gritti, your beloved … well, perhaps not so beloved. The characters have all sorts of ideas about how to revitalize the Gritti line. They may have allies, loyal servants and the like. 

What they don’t have is power. Tomaso is the one in charge and he will brook no defiance. Nor does he care very much for whatever scheme the characters have come up with. Why revitalize the house of Gritti? What need is there? Gritti is magnificent and needs no modification. Gritti shall be as it has always been - so long as Tomaso is in charge. 

If the players are to achieve greatness one of them has to wield the knife. Which one will it be? 

What will happen after Tomaso falls?