Hitchcock is a cinematic genius, but one of my favorite Hitchcock moments is a little obscure.
In Torn Curtain Paul Newman plays actual honest-to-God rocket scientist Michael Armstrong, a man with a problem. He needs information that is trapped firmly in the head of another rocket scientist, a Russian, Gustav Lindt. In order to get that information Armstrong defects to the Soviets, and in a nail-biting confrontation with Lindt tries to lure the information out of the Russian in a race against the clock.
The powers that be are on to Armstrong’s little game and are looking for him. The confrontation takes place at a university and the Soviets are searching room by room for the wily American. Meanwhile Armstrong tries the only gambit he has left; he engages Lindt in a mathematical challenge, trying to get Lindt to solve the problem that’s been haunting Armstrong for months by playing on Lindt’s intellectual arrogance.
It’s pretty much the only time I’ve seen a thrilling Physics equation.
But it brings me to my topic today. Plenty of settings have Chase rules of one kind or another. Those rules assume both actors in the scene are, well, actors. Intelligent creatures with a definite goal in mind. What happens when the race isn’t against a person, but the clock?
Night’s Black Agents solves a lot of problems by turning the situation into a Thrilling [whatever-it-may-be]. Infiltration, Interrogation, Digital Intrusion, you name it, you can Thrill with it. 7E CoC takes the position that you can solve most problems with challenges and dice mechanics. Other systems handle the chase in different ways, but the fundamental problem remains the same: while in other chases there is a tortoise and a hare, both of whom have goals and means of achieving them, in this situation it’s just the hare against inevitable doom, and doom lacks intelligence and motivation. It’s just doom. With a great big D. You can draw a silly mustache on it if you like, but it’s difficult to give faceless, voiceless Doom personality and without personality it’s difficult to really get invested.
In an ordinary chase scene the character is competing with something or someone, and the end result is in doubt. That something or someone has personality, individuality, characteristics. Even if the chase is actually a race against the elements (skiing down a mountainside barely ahead of an avalanche, eg) the elements take on a form of personality precisely because the end result is in doubt. Humans assign human characteristics to things that directly affect or interest humans, and doubt is the element that creates the direct affect.
In a race against time the end result is not in doubt. 12 noon will arrive at 12 noon whether we want it to or not. We cannot make time go faster nor can we save a single second in a jar for future use. The question is not what the result will be. It’s whether or not a thing can be achieved before the time runs out. It’s the thing to be achieved, not time, which has personality and individuality.
Let’s start with basic principles.
To make a race against the clock interesting you, as DM, need to establish stakes early on and they need to be pretty big stakes. Life or death. Victory or ruin. Salvation or damnation. No milksop middle ground for you, my friend: it’s time to get paid or die trying.
Example: your character needs to get to a doctor’s office and bring that doctor, or at least some medicine, back to the isolated little hut on the prairie where your sick daughter lies dying. If you get there before time runs out, your daughter lives. If not …
The example Hitchcock uses in Torn Curtain is much the same. Armstrong knows that time is running out and if he takes too long getting the information from Lindt then Armstrong will be arrested. It’s not in doubt whether Armstrong will get the information. What’s in doubt is whether or not he’ll do it before he gets arrested.
A similar problem arises later in the movie, when the heroes are escaping on what amounts to a fake bus. In Soviet Russia all transport is scrutinized and movement regulated, so the network the heroes use to escape has faked up an entire bus, complete with passengers, in order to transport people across country under the noses of the apparat. However, the fake bus’ progress is delayed by unforeseen circumstances which means – o dear! – the real bus, which is just behind the fake one, might catch up. The problem isn’t whether or not the bus will get to its destination. The problem is whether it will get there before its fakeness is exposed by the real bus. A chase scene, but without the chase.
As Director, it may be prudent to let the player set the stakes (or wager). That gives the player something to fight for, to bargain for. However, you should be wary of mismatched risk and reward. If the player’s willing to make that bet, they’d better be willing to put up some stakes for the reward they want.
You as Director need to set the challenges and I’d recommend limiting the number to three. Any more than that and you risk boring the group or, worse yet, winning by attrition. It’s one thing for luck to play a role, something else to call for die roll after die roll until someone finally rolls a 1, or exhausts their pools.
It may also be a good idea to determine a midway condition, something that is neither success nor failure. Say you arrive with the doctor an hour after midnight, when things are at their worst. Your daughter isn’t dead, yet, but is fading fast. While she lies in critical condition and the doctor is otherwise engaged, the Devil pops up from a fiddle contest in Georgia and says, ‘if you want this to have a successful outcome, boy, have I got a deal for you.’
Victory with a cost, in other words. The character lost the race but doesn’t have to lose their wager, so long as they’re willing to pay the price. It’s the equivalent of rolling a messy success (7-10); the player gets what they want but there’s conditions attached.
Let’s put this into an example.
Say this is a School of Night clock challenge. In School of Night the players are occult experimenters in the days of Queen Elizabeth, scholars using their esoteric knowledge for the good of the Crown. A magical challenge sounds interesting.
The scholar is deep in wild, forbidding territory and is there for a purpose. They are threatened by faerie powers but they have a ritual to complete, and they have to make sure it’s done by dawn. If cock-crow comes and it’s not finished, someone they care about will die of a faerie-inspired illness.
The characters set up a magic ward around their cauldron/ritual site to keep the bad spirits away and get to work. The ward will keep pretty much anything from attacking them directly but that doesn’t mean they can’t be spiritually attacked or frightened.
So the stakes are: get this done before dawn, or someone dies. After some discussion, a midway condition is reached: if the character doesn’t get it done by dawn the threatened person may yet live, but only if the threatened person accepts a changeling in place of their daughter. The threatened person won’t know about the switch, but the player will.
The director sets three challenges:
Fear. The faerie powers do their best to frighten the character into abandoning the ritual & leaving the protected space.
Desire. The faerie powers do their best to tempt the character into abandoning the ritual & leaving the protected space.
Exhaustion. After so many hours awake the character is using their last reserves to get the job done. Will it be enough?
The precise mechanics of those challenges will depend on the system used. This is Gumshoe which is a pool plus dice mechanic, probably Magic, probably Saturn, and if there are multiple casters then they can all add into the pool. Difficulty might increase from challenge to challenge.
There might be other ways of doing it. Say that, rather than a magical ritual, the character had to Carouse with faerie folk and keep everyone drinking and merry until dawn. There would still be three challenges. You might want to vary them a bit; Fear doesn’t fit too well with a drinking challenge. But the basics still stand.
Point being, for all it doesn’t look like a chase, it’s still a chase. The difference being, in a traditional chase scene it’s you against a foe.
Whereas in this chase it’s just the ticking clock against you.
I've been thinking about the unintended consequences of the absence of God.
There was a time when we took God, or Gods, for Granted. That mountain? God did it. The burning bush over there? God - it's a sign of things to come. A magical King who can cure scrofula just by touching you? God's holy power manifest in His human servant.
We don't do that any more, and one of the unintended consequences of this is that we don't think too much about how having an actual God that does actual Things upon this actual Earth affects plot, in any RPG setting.
For purposes of this post I'm going to assume a Pantheon of fantasy Gods each with their own area of expertise, but your campaign may do things differently.
Point The First: Divine Right of Kings
It's never entirely clear, in any fantasy setting, how the King got to be first in line at the shiny, pointy hat giveaway. It's just assumed the King is the King, and therefore.
However, there was a point when in order to be King you had to prove your worth, and more often than not this meant proving your lineage. Perhaps you were a demi-god, the offspring of Zeus or Poseidon. Perhaps you were the son of a demi-god. Perhaps you got the nearest religious authority to crown you, thus showing that God approves of your ascension to the throne. Perhaps you have to perform a miracle, such as curing someone of disease by the touch of your divinely inspired hand.
Whatever your proofs may be, you needed proof of some kind to show that you weren't just a Johnny-come-lately with a sharp knife and a winning smile. Otherwise some Johnny-come-even-more-lately might take your place some day.
The flip side to this is that, if you defy the Gods and take the crown anyway through nefarious means, your Kingdom might be punished for your misdeeds. That's essentially the story of Oedipus Rex.
How does this affect gameplay? Let me count the ways:
If your King is the Daughter of Zeus, then another offspring of Zeus might contest them for the Throne by showing off their divine qualifications. The bigger thunderbolt wins.
Before you can take the Throne you need to visit the Oracle and get its blessing, and that means Side Quest! Plus Festival! Plus possible shenanigans if all is not well at the Oracle ...
In order to become King you had to create a Divine Something - a well, let's say, that cures all who drink its water. This becomes a pilgrimage site. Then the well stops working, or falls into the hands of some hideous evil. Does this mean you have to stop being King?
Whether or not your adventuring band of misfits are Kings-in-Waiting or just the hired help, they can easily become embroiled in these shenanigans. That Divine Well, for instance, could become a quest site. Do the adventurers want to go there in order to cure, or even resurrect, a companion? Are they hired to go find out why the well ran dry?
In a modern(ish) setting there are far fewer Kings and therefore far fewer reasons to explore this trope, but even then there are ways into the mystery.
Let's say this is Night's Black Agents, with a Damned or Supernatural backstory. For there to be Damnation, there must also be Heaven. It might be a Heaven Denied situation where Lucifer's armies are constantly besieging the Pearly Gates and on the brink of victory, but nevertheless there's a Heaven. Often agents try to brew up Holy Water, if that's a bane, or acquire some divine relic like Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi.
However, that assumes that the agents are worthy of God's favor. Suppose they have to prove their worth before they can wield the powers of Kings? What does that look like?
Kings aren't the only ones touched by God. There are many places, many people, which once were ordinary but now are lumined with Divine favor. Or Satanic, for that matter - Dungeons and Dragons' Ravenloft setting, for instance, is based around the concept of a land irredeemably tainted by evil powers.
It might be an abbey where a Holy Avatar once rested, and left behind a relic. It might be a sinister crossroads where Strahd once committed some hideous act of depravity. Whatever may have happened, it left behind physical evidence and as a consequence became a place where pilgrims gather to pay tribute, or gain unholy powers.
In history, people went to great lengths to steal relics. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln once went to France to pay homage to a holy relic of Mary Magdalene, and bit off her fingers in front of the entire congregation so he could carry them back to Lincoln. He would have snapped off her arm, but lacked the strength.
Some relic vendors made their career, and fortune, out of selling, say, nails from the Holy Cross, or the finger-bones of saints. The wood and nails of the True Cross seem to act on Ship of Theseus principles and there are enough bits of saint scattered about to put together an undead Ziegfeld Follies, but the fact remains that if your church has a bit of saint or scrap of cross then your church is a very very very fine church.
A vendor gets their cash up front but pilgrimage sites made their money after they obtained the relic. Once you have, say, the skull of St. Foy, you can demand golden tribute from every citizen in the locality, and use that gold to make elaborate artefacts for your abbey. It's essentially the same trick the Mafia uses, but with less leg-breaking and property damage. Nice soul you have there. Shame if something were to ... happen to it.
Again, how does this affect gameplay?
The land is decimated, but not by plague or war; the clerics at the temple have scooped up every available gold piece, leaving nothing behind. They say their relic needs to be properly honored - but is their relic a true relic? Or is Mammon up to its usual trickery?
The relic dealer says they have a genuine holy item of glorious memory, and if true then your knightly patron wants it - but is it genuine? That's what you have to find out. Potential added moral dilemma: the item is genuine, but the relic dealer stole it from its resting place.
In order to cleanse the land of some hideous curse you have to find the artefact that's at the root of it all and carry it to a holy site for cleansing. The skull of the vampire king, say, must be drowned in the Well of St. Dunstan, or the vampire may rise again. Alternatively, the cursed item you just picked up might demand to be taken to an Unholy ritual site, where it can finally fulfil its purpose.
If this is a modern(ish) setting like, say, Trail of Cthulhu, there are all kinds of artefacts you can pick up, but they're usually cursed. The whole point behind Horror on the Orient Express, to name but one, is that you have to go to various unholy sites and pick up dangerous artefacts so you can dispose of them.
Point the Third: Animals Are Evil
First, thanks to YouTuber Ginny Di whose video about pets inspired this bit, and therefore the entire post. When I heard the age-old cry, 'The DM hates your pets!' my response was 'well, you could always accuse them of murder like in them there olden days - that sounds like an inciting incident if ever I heard one.' The rest of this post followed.
Incidentally if you're keen I highly recommend Hour of the Pig, also known as the Advocate, if you want to see this plotline in action. Also, young Colin Firth. Nudity, and so forth. Fun times.
There was a time when it was considered quite lawful, normal even, to accuse animals of crimes and punish or even execute them. Perhaps your rooster laid an egg, thus proving it was the spawn of Satan. Perhaps your pig committed murder. Perhaps that monkey really is a French spy - better hang him just to be certain.
In some instances the animal trial was a kind of trial-by-proxy. Say a nobleman commits sexual assault, or some other heinous crime. You might not be in a position to accuse, let alone convict, that nobleman. His horse, on the other hand, can be accused - even castrated. By such means are people theoretically above the law punished by the law.
These days we don't believe animals have moral agency and so cannot be held criminally responsible for whatever they may do. However, most RPG settings allow animals elevated rights of one kind or another, or human-level intelligence. Which begs the question, if your horse is so clever it can talk, is it capable of committing crimes - and can it be put on trial?
The anonymous author of Malefactio Animalium argued for two types of animals: those that were beneficial to man, and those that were not. Those which were beneficial had been designated as such by God, and that meant that Satan could work his wicked way on them, much as Satan could do to man. So those animals designated by God to be beneficial could be tempted, could commit evil acts, and thus be punished by law much as humans who committed evil acts were punished. The divine hand of God had effectively intervened, marking some creatures out as capable of doing wrong and therefore capable of being punished for their actions.
Which is an argument that we might consider nonsensical today, but then we don't have an actual God overtly intervening in mortal affairs on a daily basis. Whereas in Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy settings there are any number of Gods wandering around intervening in mortal affairs on a daily basis. If not an hourly basis.
It's not unreasonable to think that some of those Gods may have designated certain animals as beneficial to their followers. Elhonna, for example, might have sent a flock of geese to aid her worshippers, perhaps to act as some kind of honking Oracle. Erythnul might have sent some other creature to kill those geese, or corrupted the geese themselves somehow.
Whichever way it goes, it follows that as a God has marked these geese out as being distinct from other animals, the geese can do things other animals can't and shouldn't be treated the same way a so-called ordinary animal is treated. If one of them commits theft or destroys property, should they be put on trial? If a cat kills one, should the cat be accused of murder?
Having considered all that, now let's go further: in cases where the animal has an explicit bond with a person - a spellcaster and their familiar - it's very reasonable to assume that anything the familiar does is explicitly sanctioned by its spellcaster, if not actually an order from the spellcaster. In turn this suggests the spellcaster ought to be held accountable for their familiar's actions.
Depending on the setting there may be explicit rules for this within the society the spellcaster operates.
For example, within the Catholic church there's a concept called the ecclesiastical court. For much of the medieval period it was basically impossible to hold any priest accountable for anything, and 'priest' in context often meant 'I speak Latin.' The accused immediately claimed that an ordinary court, even a Royal Justice, had no authority over them; only a priest could judge a priest.
Within a magical society, where there are actual schools dedicated to teaching magic, I can picture a system in which wizards, say, demand the right to judge other wizards. No ordinary court of justice for them; only their peers have authority. Which in turn would mean that if a wizard's familiar committed a crime and someone tried to punish them for it, the wizard could claim that the court had no authority to act; the familiar would have to be tried by a conclave of wizards.
So how does this affect gameplay?
The characters are drafted in to act as legal counsel. A horse trampled a farmer to death, and is put on trial for murder. The local lord is the prosecution. The characters are the horse's defenders. If the characters play their cards right they could walk away from this with a lot of local fame, possibly a boon or two; but if they anger the local lord they could find themselves in very hot water.
The wizard's familiar is accused of theft, and embarrassingly the jewelry in question is found in the wizard's possession. The familiar swears blind they didn't do it. In fact, the crime was committed by someone else who faked it - perhaps a shapeshifter or druid who was able to make it look as if the familiar did it.
A holy shrine, well or similar location is polluted and it looks as if animals are to blame; a herd of swine did what swine usually do. The question is, did the pigs act of their own accord or did some supernatural entity push the pigs into action?
As for modern(ish), there tends to be fewer legal consequences for evil animals, but on the other hand there are often more evil animals. Packs of Satanically inspired rats, for instance, or a strange tree with peculiar creatures living in it. Quite often they're used as scouts or intelligence gatherers, occasionally as killers. It can be very useful to give the characters an advance warning of things to come by showing them animals behaving strangely, or flocking where they shouldn't.
Although contests can resolve various sorts of match-ups, in a spy thriller the most common contest is the chase, in which agents elude their pursuers in dizzying displays of combat driving or parkour, bouncing off walls and bounding over cobblestones in some picturesque European town. These rules are designed to add depth and drama to such contests ... (NBA Main Book p53)
Thrilling contests have expanded significantly since they were first introduced. Now you can have Thrilling Digital Intrusion, Thriller Negotiation, Sneaking, Dueling, Heists, Hacking, Trailing - pretty much anything your larcenous heart desires.
However most Thrilling contests assume that the agents are competing against people, or at least enemies. Suppose that wasn't so. Suppose the true threat is that ticking bomb under the table. What then?
Hitchcock always regretted his most infamous bomb scene, in Saboteur (1936). A young boy is dispatched with a parcel that must be delivered by 1 p.m. Unknown to him, the parcel contains a bomb. He dawdles, and the clock ticks. 1 p.m. comes, and goes. "You, the audience, knew it was a bomb," Hitchcock said, "And I built it up and up ... and I let the bomb go off." The audience was looking for catharsis, and got tragedy instead.
But in principle every thrilling scene works the same way as the scene in Saboteur begins. Establish the threat. Make the parameters of that threat very clear, and make sure everyone understands the threat is real. No 'it was all a dream,' no fake-out. If X happens, then you get Y - and you really don't want Y.
Then let the characters try to beat the timer.
It might not be an actual bomb, though some of the most famous spy thriller moments feature a ticking bomb clock of one kind or another. It might be a sinking ship. A burning building. An oncoming storm that's about to wash away ... the bridge, the house, whatever it may be.
Whatever it is, it's a threat. Everyone knows its a threat. The only question is whether or not the agents get there in time. Or get out of there in time, perhaps.
Remember, all Thrilling scenes use the same bare bones (Resource Guide p27):
The object for the pursuer is to reduce the Lead to 0; the object for the runner is to increase the Lead to 10 or whatever other threshold the Director sets.
A chase involves tests of a particular General ability, called the chase ability. Usually, it’s the same for both sides.
Both pursuer and runner reveal their spends simultaneously.
If one failed and the other succeeded, the Lead changes by 2; otherwise whoever got the best result changes the Lead by 1.
The runner may choose to increase the Difficulty of the next test by 1 each time.
Both sides can spend Investigative abilities for various benefits – dropping an opponent’s ability pool, raising Difficulties, setting up a stunt or special move.
Relative speed and maneuverability can affect available options in the chase.
The more agile participant has the option of performing a Swerve, spending three points from whatever ability the chase uses (Driving, Athletics, etc.) to double Lead changes this round.
If the runner has a Lead of 7 or more, and the runner wins the exchange of chase ability tests, the runner can attempt a Sudden Escape, making a test at a Difficulty of 1 + the previous Difficulty.
In situations like these, the agent is nearly always the Runner. The General Ability is going to depend on the nature of the threat. Most likely Athletics, but it could as easily be Driving, Sense Trouble, or something else.
If the agents are trying to escape a burning building, it's definitely Athletics. If they're trying to get across town to the place where the suitcase nuke is hidden so their Bang and Burner can disable it, then it's probably Driving, and so on.
In a Bomb scene, you must let the audience have information. In this instance, the audience are the agents. The agents have to know up front that there is a threat, and that it is a serious threat.
That means in the previous scene there has to have been a vital core clue that gave the agents this information. Further, the Director should underline this threat both in that previous scene and every so often in the Thrilling scene that follows, using dialogue or camera pans to show the advance of time. Let that clock tick. If it's a burning building, let it burn. Make it very clear that unless something is done something awful will happen.
In Saboteur, Hitchcock does this with actual clocks. Every so often as the young boy travels across London the camera pans to a clock, three times in the final minute of the scene. When Hitchcock doesn't pan to a clock, he pans to the bomb itself. He does that four times in the final minute of the scene, and when he's not panning either to the bomb or a clock Hitchcock pans to a cute puppy sitting next to the bomb who's about to get obliterated. For added pathos, I assume.
The Pursuer's pool should be greater than the Runner's pool. The size of the Pursuer's pool ought to be established in advance, and in full view of the agents. This is different from the usual contest, where opponent's pools are shrouded in secrecy. This exposed pool is the ticking clock. There's no point in a clock that does not tick. It is that relentless advance of time that builds tension. Or, in this case, those dwindling pools.
See, where the agent does not know the opponent's pool there can be a little bit of calculated guesswork - gambling by another name. The agent bets, not knowing precisely what cards are in the Director's hand. The agent might look for tells, or make a decision based on the opponent's apparent threat level, on the assumption that a mook's pool must be smaller than a named opponent's pool, a named opponent's pool is probably smaller than a supernatural opponent's pool, and so on.
Whereas knowing exactly how many points are in the opposition's pool provides a different kind of tension. The agent has to decide how much they want to risk, knowing that the opposition can match or raise any bet they make. If the opposing pool is larger than the agent's, then that tension increases.
Precisely how much larger will determine how much pressure the Runner is under. Let's say the Runner's pool is 12. A Pursuer with a pool of 12 poses a threat, but not perhaps a very serious one. A few good rolls early on could establish an unbeatable Lead. A refresh, through Thrilling dialogue or Investigative spends, could push the Runner over the edge.
Whereas a Pursuer with a pool of, say, 17 is a significant threat. An early Lead can be beaten down with Pursuer point spends. Moreover if the agent knows that the Pursuer has a pool of 17 then those early Runner bids are going to be very tense.
Swerves should be common. Part of the roof of the burning building collapses, or some unexpected flammable materials are discovered. An accident unrelated to the Thrilling sequence forces the driver to take a different, less helpful route to the target.
Neither side has a Maneuver or Speed advantage. You can't beat a ticking clock by running faster than time itself, not unless you have supernatural powers.
In Hitchcock's Saboteur, the Swerves are London's street scene, whether it's someone selling toothbrushes or stop signs that delay the bus. All these moments, mundane though they may be, increase tension because the audience - the agents - know there is a bomb. A swerve in your bomb scene can be equally as ordinary. Monica the secretary stops to gossip with the doorman, unaware that this delay could cost lives. The Uber driver takes a wrong turn, or delays a little to flirt with his passenger. Every little moment counts.
One other thing the Director might consider is allowing Pursuer refreshes. Ordinarily the NPC doesn't get to use Thrilling Dialogue to refresh 3 pool points. That kind of thing is purely for the agents, to give them an advantage. So it should be - when the opposition is an NPC.
When the opposition is the ticking clock, it might do the agents good to panic a little. A refresh, with some appropriate dialogue, will ratchet up the tension, particularly since this is all happening in full view of the agents.
It's probably not useful to do this more than once, given that the Pursuer started with a higher pool anyway. However, one of the more effective moments in Saboteur's bomb sequence comes when the timer slips, 1 p.m. comes and goes - and the bomb does not go off. So the audience takes a breath. Half past comes and goes. Still no explosion. It's almost 2 p.m. ...
Rear Window is a fascinating piece of cinema directed by one of the greatest talents of the medium, but it struck me as I was watching it the other day how much it relies on a setting that is as dead and gone as Caesar's Rome.
Shot in 1954 and based on a story written in 1942, the concept, setting and entire premise relies on two fundamental facts about New York in the mid-twentieth century.
First, there is no television. The glass teat does exist, and the basic technology's been around since the late 19th century. Yet it hasn't become a commodity, it isn't in every home. None of these people own a set, and if the protagonist, James Stewart's L.B. Jefferies, had one in his apartment this whole movie needn't have happened. It won't be long before televisions become commonplace; Sony sold over 4 million portable sets worldwide in 1960. It just hasn't happened quite yet.
Second, there is no air conditioning. Again, the technology exists, but it's so far out of reach for the ordinary consumer that the average New Yorker prefers to live with their windows open in the red-hot summer time. Some even sleep out on the fire escape, as the only way to get anything like a decent night's rest. I lived in New York for a short while years ago, and I can personally attest the city's just as hot in summer now as it would have been in the 1940s - but that doesn't matter any more.
15,000 persons spent last night on the beach at Coney Island and several thousand more sought relief from the heat in Brooklyn parks and playgrounds. Additional thousands slept on roof tops and fire escapes in the Brownsville, Williamsburg and other crowded sections of Brooklyn. In Manhattan, many slept on the grass in Central Park and on the open piers in the East River.
There's even a brief moment early in the film where you see someone delivering ice for the ice box, which isn't something you'd see nowadays. The ice box, if you don't know, is literally that: a box where you keep ice, so you can put butter and other perishables in cold storage. Once the ice brick you bought melts, you buy another one. Selling ice was a major line of business, in the days before refrigerators. It's something people have been doing since before the birth of Christ, and only came to an end relatively recently.
But here's the kicker: Rear Window can only exist because there is no television, and because there is no air conditioning. As a result, people live outdoors more, open their windows more - which lets Jefferies peer into their private lives, and provides the inciting incident that kicks the entire movie into gear.
New York still exists. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a neighborhood like the one Jefferies lives in. The film's shot on a Paramount stage built especially for the occasion, but it shouldn't be that difficult to find somewhere in Greenwich Village that looks like Rear Window. What you won't find are a lot of open windows. The landlord will have made sure they can't be opened, since the law changed in the 1970s so as to stop kids plummeting to their doom. You also won't find many people looking outdoors; either they're watching television, or their mobile devices, or both.
Rear Window's New York is as dead as dead can be, which is probably one of the reasons why the 1999 remake with Christopher Reeve didn't work.
When designing a setting, think about how people live and what they have to do in order to live well. Not just the big stuff, like which Camarilla faction holds political sway after dark, or whether ghosts are secretly controlling the police force. I mean the small stuff. What do people do for fun? How do they get their food? Do they have light when night falls, and if so how is that managed? What happens when it's hot? What happens in the rainy season? What happens when it snows? What happens to all the shit - literally, the shit - that your average city produces every day? Is someone hauling that off to the tanner's vats, or the farmer's fields? Are there public toilets, public baths? Do people just fling their waste into the streets?
Not that you, as GM, have to answer all those questions, but even answering one or two can lend a lot of atmosphere to your setting. Say that street lights are had by capturing souls and setting them on fire, which is something that happens to the souls of the poorest of the poor who can't afford proper burial. In Sword of the Serpentine's Eversink everyone tries to make statues for their dead, but there are always going to be people who can't manage that, or whose statues break. What if the alternative is an eternity roasting in hellfire so the wealthy can have decent street lighting? What kind of ghost catcher would the city have to employ to make that system work? How would the poor feel about that? Would there be riots, with people demanding that instead of using the poverty-stricken the city burns foreign souls instead? How do the characters feel about that?
Let's go from the general to the slightly more specific. What I want to talk about this time is the Building, as setting and as plot device.
Rear Window wouldn't work if all Jefferies did was stare at the murderer all day. He has an entire world at his disposal, from Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyhearts to the sculptor, the newlyweds, the old married couple, the composer, and dozens of others who appear and disappear like mayflies. They all exist within an artificial concept which I'm going to call The Building, even though the concept extends outside the walls of the structure to the coffee shops and railway stations of the film's 'outside world'. In the film's conceit the Building is literally that, and Jefferies is tied to that spot because he has a broken leg. The audience hardly ever sees anything from any perspective other than Jefferies' room.
Loadingreadyrun recently finished a short series directed by Jacob Burgess called Not A Drop To Drink, a Vampire chronicle set in Vancouver Island. I recommend it to anyone thinking about getting into tabletop but isn't sure how best to do it. However I bring it up now because of something Jacob said in the Q&A.
In answer to the question, was there anything you changed about the campaign due to decisions taken during session 0 (about 1.09.54 in), Jacob replies:
I had nothing planned going in ... I made a city, I wrote a city and all of the people in it ... and then you drop four [players] into it. I really didn't plan anything ahead of time and I used the elements people gave me, what they wanted, what they said some of the characters' desires were because those are sometimes different things and sometimes they even conflict ... to then feed in and fold everything in, so we all created the space we got to play in.
Jacob created a city and all of the people in it. Many settings do the same; Swords of the Serpentine again is a classic example of this, where the GM has an entire city at her disposal ready to be populated.
I'm going to suggest to you now, as GM to GM, that this conceit is the Building. It is the structure in which the action happens, and in which people meet the players, creating plot. It can be as large or small as you need it to be. Some games need entire planets. Some stories can play out within a single structure.
Most of Rear Window happens within one apartment; Jefferies can see other apartments, other people, but he's as locked in as any prisoner in Sing Sing. If he wants to talk to other people, they either have to be in the room with him or he needs to call them on the phone. Half the tension in the final act is precisely because the audience is locked in there with Jefferies; they can't move any more or any further than he can.
The Building is that area in which you, as GM, expects plot to happen. For plot to happen, the GM needs to populate the Building, either with people or events with which the players can interact. It is player interaction, not NPC action, that makes plot.
For example, in a Cyberpunk session that I'm creating for some friends of mine, I've created:
Zhirafa Alley: For whatever reason the Zhirafa police drones have a bug in their programming about this crossroads. There used to be a CHOOH2 station here, run by some of the Aldecaldos. That went up in the third strafe. Nobody knows what happened to piss the drones off, but they regularly zap moving targets and complaints to Precinct #2 are ignored. Shooting back does not help; it only summons more Zhirafas.
I haven't written any more than that. I shouldn't need to. There's enough here to paint a scene and give the players something to interact with. Whether or not they go any further than that is up to them. They might never encounter Zhirafa Alley. I certainly haven't splattered stats all over the page, any more than (I suspect) Jacob gave each and every one of the dozens of NPCs in Not a Drop full stats. What would be the point?
Of course, if the players start paying close attention to Zhirafa Alley, that's a different story. That's the point at which I start thinking about stats, and motives, and other player-engagement things. Just as (I suspect) Jacob at least partially statted out the more important Not a Drop NPCs, like the Sherriff, as soon as he realized that NPC could become plot-critical.
Moving from the slightly more specific to the very specific, consider this potential Cyberpunk answer to the question, where do the characters live?
If you've existed on the internet for longer than five minutes you've probably seen at least one story or video about Hong Kong's coffin homes:
With the obvious caveat that the rich can buy much nicer coffins than the one in the Hong Kong video.
This is nothing new. We tend to think that the ideal middle class environment is the detached suburban house with garage, back yard, decent schools nearby for the 2.5 kids we intend to have and so on. We forget that suburbs are a very recent creation - late 19th century, with England's Metroland - and only came about because the train, and later the car, extended our reach. Before them, we could only ever go within walking distance of work and food. People lived in tiny houses or stuffed whole families into single rooms in big cities because there was no other affordable space.
Public transport was an incredible boon that allowed places like London to burst their boundaries, with buses, trains and highways creating new suburban opportunities. Trouble being, nobody's invented anything better since then, and the boomer generation's greying suburbs means installing more highways or better rail networks is almost impossible because grandpa doesn't want that in his backyard. That creates more pressure on the existing habitable space, which in turn creates demand for even the smallest of city habitats.
In the world of CP RED space is at a premium. After the nuke dropped, refugees ran away from the hot zone and set up temporary-but-permanent tent housing in what was the former Beavertown of Rancho Coronado. Many people don't have the luxury of four walls and a roof. As for public transport ...
Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the Dark Future has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Don't expect the inner-city world of the Time of the Red to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports. Instead, think of it as a patchwork of badly up-kept roads, abandoned airports, and trains plagued by gangs and intermittent service. (Main Book, Everyday Life p 322).
So if you want any kind of work at all you need to live close to where you work. Odds are unless you have a lot of cash in your pocket you can't afford whatever travel networks exist, and that assumes those networks are safe(ish) to use - which they almost certainly aren't. When Rancho Coronado was a Corporate-controlled Beavertown with actual transport options this wasn't a problem. Nowadays, though, when you can't even reliably drive anywhere and Rancho Coronado is basically a tangled slum, we have:
Crystal Rock
Nobody remembers how Crystal Rock got its name, but it probably wasn't a compliment. When refugees first started flooding into Rancho Coronado many of them were temporarily housed in this old sports stadium. Over time, as Rancho Coronado devolved and it became clear there were few options for the forcibly evacuated, enterprising businessmen started adding portable Cubes, as a kind of an upgrade to tent housing and uncovered sleeping pallets. After all, it's not like the Rancho Raiders were ever going to play here again. Cubes piled on top of Cubes, and a couple of Cargo Containers were added to the mix for those who could afford luxury accommodation.
Cubes: You live in a single windowless room with a nice strong lock where you can touch both walls if you spread your arms. Flatpack furniture folds out of the walls, converting your cell from a chair with a desk to a bed with a small television. [Notice how even this is better than the Hong Kong coffin; there's space to sit, and a desk. You could work from home in this environment. It wouldn't be pleasant, but it would be doable.]
Cargo Containers: You'll have plenty of places to store your things, a bed to sleep comfortably, a desk, electricity, a refrigerator, microwave, and sink, protected by the security of a strong lock.
None of this was designed by any kind of qualified architect. It just grew like Topsy, built on top of what was intended to be temporary tent housing inside a sports stadium. Think of it like a ring fort, with the outer ring being the old stadium (now basically a kind of glorified strip mall catering mainly to residents), the next ring being open air tents and sleeping pallets, the next ring being Cubes, and the innermost ring being Cargo Containers. The final two rings are piled on top of each other, on foundations of building rubble and old abandoned Cubes. Sometimes there's a shift underneath that shakes the whole structure. It probably doesn't mean anything. You get from low to tall by means of escalators, which don't always work. Climbing all the way up to Container level when the escalators don't work is a real five-storey-brownstone pain in the ass. Luckily some enterprising folks have set up little mobile kibble wagons at each level, some even with seating, so climbers can take a break when they need to.
Many of the people who live here are in construction and entertainment. Company transport wagons bus them over to Pacifica Playground to the West, where there are plenty of jobs. The ones who don't work in Pacifica either work in one of the nearby construction or factory zones, or they have a hard time getting by.
Utilities (power and water) are handled on-site by filtration plants and solar generators. The Cubes and Containers aren't plumbed-in (though some of the more expensive Containers do have micro-shower cubicles). Instead there are public lavatories and showers inside the Stadium, accessed by private keys issued to tenants. The company that manages the utilities, toilets and showers, River Bend Management, is every tenant's love-to-hate company. Brownouts are common in the hot months, when everyone tries to run a fan or some kind of air conditioning.
Wireless Nodes nearby are run by three different service providers, of which the most popular is Feebus, with its cartoon winged man logo. Feebus isn't more reliable than the others, but it's cheaper.
Gang activity was a big problem in Crystal Rock's early days, but it's less of a problem now thanks in part to BozoByeBye, a loosely organized neighborhood watch. Originally set up by a Solo who's since moved out of Crystal Rock, BozoByeBye was created to deal with a persistent Bozo infestation in the Stadium. Nearly every permanent resident has the BBB app installed in their Agent, and it's generally assumed that when an alert pings someone in the group will deal with the problem. Eventually.
There is no security per se. River Bend keeps a remote eye on its installation and occasionally a Precinct #2 Zhirafa flies over, but there are no armed guards on patrol.
OK, so that's the Building. More than enough information there to keep the players entertained. What about the people?
Let's stick to three per area to keep things as simple as possible. So what are the areas? Broadly: the Stadium, the Tents, the Cubes, the Containers.
Stadium: Khan a cheerful little man in his early thirties (Aikido 6) who owns and operates PatchIt, a clothing repair store, bullet holes a specialty. He's dry cleaner, leatherworker and tailor to all of Crystal Rock. When this was still a sports stadium his store was a souvenir shop, and he hasn't changed the layout much. He also runs a self-defense class for Crystal Rock tenants.
Mulligan a broad-faced woman in her early forties, techie, River Bend's main maintenance operative. Big fan of BBB, will abandon a job in progress to go hunting with her shotgun.
Hooman an acne-scarred Fixer in his mid-twenties, the unofficial pharmacist for Crystal Rock. Limited medical skills, nothing like a ripperdoc or even a competent medtech but he can at least fill you full of narcotics, slap your ass and send you on your way.
Tents:Alice, formerly a dancer with minor exotic body mods (cat), lost her main gig after a bout with cyberpsychosis. Scrapes a living refilling noodle Vendits in the Stadium, dreams of getting back into Pacifica. Local strip joint TropicalMotion keeps offering her work and she keeps turning it down.
El Nagar, a Solo lying low after a really bad gig. Light tattoos indicate Triad affiliations. Enhanced Antibodies, Skin Weave, Vampyres. Keeps a machete and an SMG on him at all times. Likes to play chess.
Sudo, a gambling fanatic who sometimes has a Cube but more often than not is out in the tents again. His main game is poker. His prize possession is his Netrunning deck (500eb), the only thing he's never sold or pawned.
Cubes: Dirty Dirty, affiliated with theAldecaldos, is Crystal Rock's Shylock. Mid-forties, broad and brawny. If you want a loan and have something to pawn, he's your guy. He doesn't really live in his Cube; it's more of a storage space for the stuff people give him. The lock's much better than average, and you won't get the combination from Dirty Dirty even at gunpoint. Day in, day out, you'll find him sat outside his Cube waiting for business.
Mikey, construction worker (borgware Sigma, heavy lifter), eternally cheerful, to such an extent people wonder if he's permanently stoned. He does a lot of work in dangerous zones; people joke his footprints glow.
Cleo, kibble vendor who runs a stall out on the Cube's rooftops. Korean theme, has a popular sideline in medicinal foods or boyangshik. Always on the lookout for her deadbeat former girlfriend Seo-yun, who's often strung out on Hooman's latest batch.
Containers:Hibiscus, rocker/entertainer at a Pacifica nightclub, Redemption. Age impossible to guess, apparent age twenty-one. They specialize in pre-Bomb classics, more feel-good than high-intensity. One of Khan's dedicated students, and often runs the class if he's not available (Aikido 6).
Wally, corporate shark (literally - shark aquaform), works human resources for a construction firm, Premier General. He's one of the few people in Crystal Rock who was actually born in Rancho Coronado, pre-Bomb. He remembers coming to watch the Rancho Raiders with his dad when this was still a stadium.
Bobbi J, media, street scribe with a local music scene focus, a regular vidcast, Spread the Word, known in Rancho but not elsewhere. Popularly thought to have links with Network 54 talent scouts. Almost pro-level dancer, technicolor hair.
That's it. That's the Building. That's all you need.
Insert players, watch plot develop. Will they help Cleo save Seo-yun? Go Bozo hunting with Mulligan? What's the deal with El Nagar, and will some heavy hitters come looking for the Solo down on his luck? Is Dirty Dirty going to have to break Sudo's leg before Sudo coughs up the cash? Is Mikey borderline cyberpsycho or is his permanent happiness actually the real deal? Jesus, what is up with Feebus today - reception's patchy as hell. Will River Bend ever fix the fracking toilets - and what is causing that stink anyway? (My money's on a dead Bozo Mulligan chased down an HVAC vent, but you never know ...)
This video is sourced from Side Note, a channel about obscure historical and geographical topics.
Imagine a man whose mission is to transport secrets. Sometimes it's nothing, sometimes it's something. It might be a box of Cuban cigars, or it might be the ins and outs of the latest missile crisis. He's very nearly a stock character out of a Hitchcock film, or an Agatha Christie novel: white, almost certainly male, very British, probably in his forties, probably spent his entire working career in the diplomatic service. He's about as unrepresentative of the Commonwealth as it is possible to be, unless you reduce the Commonwealth to Australia and Canada. Even Australia's a bit of a stretch, since judging by that photograph at 1.06 none of them have seen the sun in years. Yet he represents the Commonwealth, carrying communiques back and forth from all corners of the globe each day of his working life. All that for about 25-35K a year, more or less. Plus expenses, presumably, but even so that's a relatively meagre pay packet for that level of responsibility.
Side Note points out that these messengers have been targeted by honey traps, and the risk to their lives (and messages) is real enough. In addition to those examples mentioned in the video, two are known to have died in accidents: a plane crash in South America in 1947, while another went down with the SS Berlin in 1907. The Berlin sinking is one of those explicable tragedies common to sea travel, but the crash of BSAA Star Dust has been fodder for conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists almost from the moment she went down.
Events like these are the stuff of detective novels, and Agatha Christie used a plot much like it in her 1922 novel The Secret Adversary. The kick-off is the sinking of the Lusitania during the Great War, when a male diplomatic courier who knows he isn't getting on a lifeboat hands the McGuffin over to a female passenger to deliver to the embassy. However she never gets there, and the story is about what happens next. Christie doesn't specifically mention King's Messengers, but it's pretty clear what her doomed courier is.
So how to use this in your Night's Black Agents or Dracula Dossier game?
To start with, the Messengers are obvious targets for enemy action. If the Conspiracy can read minds, or pull the Dracula mesmerism trick, then the Messengers are likely targets. Even if the Conspiracy never gets to read those messages in the diplomatic bag, the courier's mind is a very useful secondary target. These are the people in the room where it happens, after all. They've seen and heard things that nobody else had the chance to. Knowing what they know could be invaluable.
Impersonating one would be a very handy way of getting past what might otherwise be impenetrable security. A passport, a tie, the right kind of public schoolboy mannerisms and you're golden. Of course, it would be a shame if your vampire type was one of those allergic to silver; those greyhound pins and insignia would be the very devil. Grit your fangs and bear it, I suppose.
In the Dracula Dossier Edom would probably want to keep half an eye on the Messengers, just in case. Sounds like a job for Osprey, and in a low-key game where Edom is a handful of in-the-know operatives working through friendlies and go-betweens it's likely Osprey is a Messenger. After all, he's got to have some kind of diplomatic day job that allows him to keep an eye on operations worldwide. Besides, he's practically built for it: smooth features, well-preserved, well-dressed, Etonian accent? Hello, Central Casting!
Of course, impersonating a Messenger is a one-time-only gig. It gets you out of a scrape, but almost certainly raises every single red flag it is possible to raise. There are only a few of them, after all. Given the delicacy of their work they're probably monitored very closely. I say probably - we are talking about the English, whose tradition of bumbling towards disaster is well established. Perhaps it's all done on a handshake and a smile. Traitors have skated under the old school tie before, with hardly anyone bothering to delay their progress let alone stop them before they skip across to Moscow. Or Dracula's Castle, in the current fictional narrative.
A player agent as a Messenger is a very intriguing possibility. Being an active diplomatic agent does limit your options; you can't just bunk off for the day to stake vampires if you're meant to be carrying vital messages to, say, the Mission in Bahrain. However a Messenger is the ultimate Mule, more likely to take Archaeology or Art History than Forgery, or perhaps just extra points in Bureaucracy. The sort of agent used to High Society, with a healthy dose of Flattery and Bullshit Detector. Traditionally the Messenger doesn't carry a gun, but that doesn't stop them having a decent Shooting or Hand-to-Hand pool. That said, Preparedness, Shrink, Surveillance and Network seem more likely General spends.
Perhaps your agent is a former Messenger, someone shuffled out of the Service for the good of the Service. Oh, you got your pension and possibly even a gong; after all, nobody really wants to admit what happened even if it is an open secret. You still belong to all your old clubs, and wear the tie now and again. Plus, you have Network friends in all sorts of interesting places. However if anyone's likely to bear a smoldering grudge it's the man who got canned from the most interesting diplomatic job ever. Could be more interesting if it was the woman who got canned; misogyny's a potent motivator, and Lord knows the British establishment's riddled with it. Revenge or Thrill-Seeker (back in the saddle again) seem reasonable Drives, possibly also Transparency and Patriotism.
After all that, a scenario seed:
The PEP (Politically Exposed Person)
Allan Daigliesh, Queen's Messenger, is a happily married man with two sons and a daughter, all rapidly approaching University age. It's been a difficult marriage; constant travel takes its toll, and Allan hasn't always been a model husband. However he's recently been behaving erratically, and the question is whether it's stress of the job or something else. Edom is interested in Allan's case, and brings the agents in to find out what, if anything, is going on.
The Cuckoo. One of Allan's children is becoming romantically involved with a Legacy, most likely Billie Harker, Tabitha Holmwood or Thad Morris, but it's Director's choice. Allan knows this, and knows what the Legacy represents because he's had brushes with Edom before. The last thing he wants is for his child to get anywhere near the shadowy world of Edom, but all attempts to break off the relationship have failed. That's why he's nervous; he knows it's only a matter of time before these chickens come home to roost.
The Renfield. The Conspiracy is putting pressure on Allan through his wife Belinda, who's traded in the red wine for a different scarlet beverage. The Conspiracy knows Allen makes regular trips to [X] Mission, and wants to see what's in his diplomatic bag. Either Belinda is using Aberrance tricks to get the information, or the Conspiracy's just using her as leverage to get Allen to do what it wants. The pressure's affecting Allan's job performance, and there's a chance he may break under the strain.
The Man in the Mirror. Allen's learned one secret too many and wants to change his life for the better. He wants to do something to make it right, and he's started with a little whistleblowing. Perhaps he's made contact with the Journalist (or someone posing as the Journalist) or a foreign diplomat like the Chinese Agent, but whoever it is has Conspiracy links. Allan thinks he's about to do something good, for once; he doesn't know he's talking to the worst kind of people. Assuming, of course, that they are really people …
Keepers often over-indulge, and forget Strunk's ageless wisdom: omit needless words.
Worse, needed words are misplaced.
Consider: It's the start of the session and you, the Keeper, are trying to set a scene. You talk about the weather, the countryside, its geography, even its history. You talk about the city and its streets, the mist that seeps out of manhole covers, rising from some forgotten, dark hole below. You might spend ten minutes expounding, because you see all this as important, even vital. How will the players know what's going on, if you don't tell them?
All this is Exposition.
Hitchcock's 100% gold. Exposition cannot be the spotlight moment, especially not at the beginning of the story. Never start a session with a ten-minute spiel about the weather, the setting, or, God forbid, the geopolitical situation. Or even the local political situation. Devote, at most, one sentence to the start - or as I'd describe it, the starting gun - and then get out of the way.
Night's Black Agents, and the agent is tasked with surveilling a suspicious character. The larger story can be about anything up to and including an apocalyptic death ray, but that's not how you start. You start with the agent, in the moment, doing a thing.
'Pretending to window-shop on a street full of holiday-happy people, you see your target slip into an upmarket coffee shop.'
That's all you need. Don't worry about anything else; the player takes it from there. It doesn't matter whether it's Halloween or Christmas. It doesn't matter whether it's the high street of some regional town, or London. Or Paris. You can define all that in play. Hell, you can even define the target in play - male, female, dressed how, ethnicity? After all, if there's one thing disguise expert Jonna Mendez teaches us, it's that the person who seems to be a young Asian female might be a white European male. If you as Keeper want a particular NPC in the scene, and the player describes a different person, no problem! Your NPC was in disguise all along.
Bear in mind what Hitchcock says about North by Northwest, because that illustrates my other point: needed words are misplaced. You can have exposition. You'll need lots of it later on, when the player wants to know important details about the geopolitical situation, or whatever it may be. Just don't have it right at the beginning of the session. That's when everyone's at the starting gate, eager to get on with it. Don't bore the group with ten minutes of blah when what they want is five minutes of action. Exposition is for explaining what has happened, not what is going to happen.
Going back to omit needless words, I'm also going to draw on the wisdom of M.R. James. I've been re-reading his short stories, and two things struck me.
First, like James Herbert, he goes there, sets it on fire, and sells hot dogs. In a much more genteel Victorian way - James would probably prefer roasting chestnuts. Yet James knows horror is best when the reader, the ordinary person, can picture themselves in the scene. "If I am not careful, something like this might happen to me …" That's why most of James' protagonists are young, professional people, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. Too old, or too young, wouldn't work as well. Professional people, well-to-do, thoroughly upper middle class, because James knows (or thinks he knows) his audience shares those traits. Their lives are fairly ordinary; some hold important jobs, or academic positions, but you could pass by them in the street and not immediately know them for who they are. One even rides the Clapham omnibus, the legal definition of the ordinary man.
So James takes the ordinary man off in a dark corner and threatens his life - or, in some cases, plain old kills him. Or kills his children. It's remarkable how often dead children appear in James' stories; I can't think of another author quite so keen to deliver pre-teens to the slaughter. I remember James Herbert had a baby eaten by rats, and Stephen King pulled off something similar in Salem's Lot, but neither of them made a habit of it. Whereas James pulls this chilling swerve all the time.
... the baby, I am sure, was alive. Punch [Punch and Judy] wrung its neck, and if the choke or squeak it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality ... [The Story of a Disappearance, and a Reappearance.]
Second, James doesn't bother with things that aren't important, and that includes characters, even those that have narrative impact.
"I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor," said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James' College.
The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.
"Yes," he said; "My friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast - in point of fact to Burnstow (I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow."
"Oh, Parkins," said his neighbor on the other side, "If you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templar's preceptory, and let me know if you think if it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer."
It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.
Some of you may recognize this as the start of James' most famous story, Oh Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad. It's been reprinted countless times in any number of anthologies, and filmed at least twice, probably more often. Also a song by Robbie Burns, and I don't doubt James got a laugh out of that.
Look at what James is doing. He sets up the moment in one sentence, which tells you everything you need to know about the moment and the people in it. More importantly, he has a dialogue with three people, in which only one, Parkins, is important to the story - so he does not bother to name the other two. He doesn't even name Parkins until the third paragraph; before that he is merely a young, neat, precise Professor of Ontography.
Think! How often have you been asked, 'who is this NPC? What's their name?' How often have you had the courage to reply, 'as (s)he's not relevant to the narrative going forward, I shall not name him/her.'
If the player wants that NPC to become relevant, then by all means let the player name them. Grow fond of them. Even shoehorn them into the story somehow.
That's when you, as Keeper, murder that NPC in the most gruesome way possible. Harden your heart. If James can shove pre-teens into the sausage mincer, you can feed so-and-so into the ghoul pit. If nothing else, it alerts the agents to vital information - that there is a ghoul pit, and it should be avoided if they want to live.
So! Omit needless words. Exposition explains what has happened, not what is going to happen. If it is not necessary, ignore it - don't even name it, if you don't have to.
Get on with the story. That's the important thing.
Once upon a time when the world was slightly saner than it is today, I mentioned a Cuban drama in which diplomats claimed to have fallen foul of a sonic superweapon. Incredibly, that story still has legs. Only this week the Guardian claimed a freedom of information victory, and got its hands on diplomatic cables and other official communications that, the paper claimed, shed light on the mystery.
Except … it kinda didn't. For all the fanfare, the released documents shed as much light as a snuffed-out candle. Nobody knows what happened. The Americans aren't in a hurry to find out. The Cubans, mightily pissed, are confident the whole thing's nonsense from beginning to end. There's some madcap Canadians who think the diplomats might have been unintentionally poisoned by insect spray.
The big, and probably unintentional, result is that diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US broke down, and frankly, given that the Jackass is currently disgracing the Presidency with his presence, those diplomatic relations were dead in the water. If it wasn't this, some other crisis would have come along and the GOP would have found an excuse to pull the plug. After all, the diplomatic rapprochement was an Obama administration policy, and the GOP's done its damndest to kill off every other Obama policy.
However the sonic superweapon got me thinking: what exactly do you need to design a spy thriller? High stakes? International locales? Femme fatales, or high-speed action sequences? Sinister superweapons? Diplomatic intrigue?
The answer to this question comes from Hitchcock, as you might expect.
Hitchcock made spy thrillers where ladies vanish on trains. Saboteurs send young children across London, with bombs hidden in film cans. Secrets that could change the course of world politics are whispered by dying men to total strangers. An ad executive meeting his mother for lunch is mistaken for a superspy. An American physicist defects to Moscow to steal rocketry secrets. Hitchcock knew the spy genre inside and out - and his spy thrillers were the simplest possible.
You need a McGuffin, one important enough to get people worked up. You need an interesting situation. You need tension. That's it.
Consider The Lady Vanishes (1938).
In that film, as is so often the case with Hitchcock, the McGuffin is never revealed, or even described. We know it's important, because everyone treats it as if it is important. Miss Froy, the elderly Englishwoman who has the McGuffin, vanishes - and it's as if she was never there. Miss Froy's chance companion, Iris Henderson, at first is puzzled, then horrified, as person after person says there is not, and never was, a Miss Froy - and it's her horror that propels her over the threshold and into the spy thriller. Who can she trust? Who's in the enemy camp? What happened to that dear old lady?
Hitchcock was a past master at building tension with very little, cinematic bricks without straw. A modern director uses flashy car chases and impossible parkour sequences; Hitchcock got the same result with two buses, one after the other, slowly traversing the countryside (Torn Curtain). This is where the interesting situation comes in, and Hitchcock was smart enough to realize that any situation can be interesting, under the right conditions.
With The Lady Vanishes, the interesting situation is the train journey. A few score strangers jammed together for hours, days at a time. A definite time limit - that train will eventually arrive at its destination, and once that happens, all chance of saving Miss Froy is gone. Mile after mile of unforgiving countryside, with nowhere to go, nowhere to turn for help.
Imagine for a moment a Night's Black Agents sequence where the agents are on the London Underground. They know there's an enemy agent on the train who wants to kill them, but they don't know who that agent is. It could be any one of the twenty-odd people in the carriage. So they wait. At Westbourne Park three people get off, two get on. The agents wait. Several more leave at Latimer Road. They wait. More get off at Shepherd's Bush, and now there are only half a dozen suspects left from the twenty-odd who were on board at Paddington. Of course, the agents could provoke a confrontation, but if they get it wrong then their cover's blown to no purpose. In the worst case, they might get a civilian killed. Hammersmith's coming up, the end of the line. If they wait till then, they may have a much better chance of telling the assassin from the commuters - but Hammersmith could be what the assassin's waiting for. They could get off the train before Hammersmith - but what if the assassin follows, mingling with the other passengers?
All this aboard an ordinary Hammersmith underground train. The Hammersmith and City runs hundreds of times a day, pretty much every day God sends. It takes about an hour. Imagine running a full hour of a game session where the agents have nothing to do but wonder - is it that kid? The old man? The woman with the baby carriage? Or, since it's vampires we're talking about, is the bastard hanging onto the roof waiting for me to get off?
A McGuffin. A situation. All that's wanted is tension, and we're off to the races. That tension, those thrills, don't have to come from gunfights or explosions. They can come from something as simple as a boy walking across London with a film cannister under his arm. What matters is, there are stakes - the explosion - and a definite timetable. If X doesn't happen by Y, then ...
As a film nut I often seek out interesting movie houses, film festivals and big screen entertainment, all the more because I don't get much chance to do so down here. I thought this time out I'd examine some classic cinema, and to give this a gaming twist I'd see which of these films is best suited to a Director/Keeper.
I'm going to concentrate on the films of British genius Alfred Hitchcock, whose big screen career stretches from the early days of silent film up to the 1970s. I may dwell on some of his slightly more obscure works, since I figure you've probably already seen Psycho at least once. I'm not going to consider films in which he wasn't the director, and if you're hoping I've somehow found one of his lost films, sorry, but no. I'm not that lucky.
Without further ado:
Sabotage(aka The Woman Alone). This 1936 drama stars Oskar Homolka as saboteur Karl Anton Verloc, Sylvia Sidney as his wife, John Loder as heroic detective Sergeant Ted Spencer, and child actor Desmond Tester as young Stevie. Karl is an agent for hire who agrees to carry out acts of sabotage in London. We first see him tampering with a power station, temporarily knocking it out. He's expecting a big reward for this but is disappointed to learn his bosses aren't best pleased, as his stunt did nothing except make London laugh when they wanted London terrified. This leads them to demand greater things of Verloc, and they supply him with a bomb which Verloc is supposed to plant at a train station. However Verloc gets nervous and, thinking he'll be suspected, he gives the disguised bomb to young Stevie to deliver instead. This kicks off one of the most suspenseful scenes in British cinema as Stevie, all unknowing, tries to get to his destination in time. We watch him get lost, get delayed, and all the while are screaming inside because at any moment the bomb could go off.
Bookhounds Keepers need to see this film for its accurate and fascinating portrayal of London in the 1930s, particularly the street scenes.
As an espionage thriller it's remarkable for three things:
Its portrayal of its antiheroes as misanthropic, greedy men, which is a more accurate depiction of actual traitors and spies than usually seen on film.
Its portrayal of hero Ted Spencer, as a reminder of how we used to imagine the heroes of this kind of thriller. An archetype soon to be replaced by the likes of Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, Spencer is more a Bulldog Drummond type, but unlike the stock hero he abandons his principles pretty quickly when Mrs Verloc, the woman he loves, is in danger.
The bomb-maker, who has to be seen to be believed.
The Lady Vanishes. This 1938 tale sees Margaret Lockwood as carefree dilettante Iris Henderson thrust headfirst into mystery and death aboard a luxury train that might as well be the Orient Express. She's travelling across Europe back to England so she can marry a blue-blooded idiot, but falls in with octogenarian Miss Froy, a charming old lady who vanishes mysteriously. Iris' attempts to find out what happened to her are frustrated when all her fellow passengers say they've never heard of or seen Miss Froy, and Iris is accused of making the whole thing up. Knife-wielding magicians and sinister bandaged men follow in quick succession, as Iris dodges assassins and soldiers in her search for the truth.
If you've ever wanted to run Horror on the Orient Express, this is the movie for you.
The first appearance of comedy stock British characters Charters and Caldicott, who appear in several other films including wartime espionage drama Night Train to Munich. A master-class in how to make supporting characters memorable.
Saboteur. A wartime drama which kicks off with the immolation of a bomber factory, and one of the most cold-blooded cinematic killings of all time. As the factory goes up in flames, two would-be heroes rush to the rescue. The villain passes one of them a fire extinguisher, which is immediately grabbed by his friend who rushes in to fight the blaze. Unfortunately for him the extinguisher's actually full of gasoline, and he dies in a ball of flame. Admittedly as an assassination it's a bit cheesy - how did the villain know to have a trick fire extinguisher on hand at that exact moment? - but as a piece of cinema it's undeniably effective. Which is emblematic of the movie as a whole; because it's filmed in 1942 when everyone's at their patriotic height - filming started two weeks after Pearl Harbor - there are any number of Truly Heroic Moments And Brave Speeches, but that doesn't prevent this being a brilliant film. The climax alone, atop the Statue of Liberty, is worth the price of admission.
If Lady Vanishes is a master-class in making supporting characters memorable, this is a master-class in villainy. One character in particular, whose name I shan't mention as it might spoil his entrance - one of the best introductions of a major character I've ever seen - is superb. Charming, persuasive, and utterly ruthless, his defense of totalitarianism is chilling. Moreover for a wartime film about sabotage there isn't a racist Japanese or German stereotype in it, which is remarkable in and of itself.
As luck would have it I'm reading Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, and thought this was worth repeating: 'The real horror of Himmler is not that he was unusual or unique but that he was in many ways quite ordinary, and that he could have lived out his life as a chicken farmer, a good neighbor with perhaps some antiquated ideas about people.'
Hitchcock's known for gorgeous set-pieces, but that moment atop Lady Liberty is undoubtedly one of his best. Better, I'd say, than a very similar moment in North By Northwest, though the latter film is more well known.
Night's Black Agents Directors wondering what Dust mode looks like on film need look no further. One scene in particular, the murder of a security man, epitomizes the whole gruesome, exhausting business.
Ever wonder what it's like to create Thrilling Contest scenes that aren't car chases or acrobatic parkour leaps from rooftop to rooftop? See how you can have a theoretical physics Thrilling Contest, or a cat-and-mouse with two buses.
The race to the border is the very essence of an extended Heat contest, right up to the final moment when someone machine guns the plot.
Much like The Lady Vanishes the supporting characters are memorable and interesting in their own right. My hat's off to unnamed tetchy ballerina played by actual ballerina Tamara Toumanova; now there's someone you have to feel a little sorry for!
Topaz. On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a French intelligence operative is asked by an American contact to investigate potential NATO leaks within the French government. In doing so he runs foul of Topaz, a French spy ring that's been funneling NATO military secrets to Moscow. He has to use every trick in the book in his search for the truth, and even then it might not be enough, as his shadowy opposite number Columbine, head of Topaz, is so well connected that not even the strongest evidence may be enough to get him arrested, never mind convicted. Frederick Stafford, a spy film veteran, plays the heroic French lead Andre Deveraux, and at the time critics blamed his performance for the film's poor box office. Having seen the film I don't agree; his performance wasn't stellar, but he's unfairly blamed. No, to my mind the larger problem is that an audience used to Bond level heroics can't get behind a spymaster who actually behaves like a spymaster - that is, he gets other people to do all the dirty work. So the action scenes and heroics belong to other actors, and Stafford shows up only when the big scenes are over and done. Even at the end - and there are several possible endings depending on which version of the end you watch - he isn't directly involved. All the big moments belong to other actors.
Night's Black Agents directors and players both need to watch this, to get a better understanding of Network. Deveraux is a master of this very important Ability; his agents and catspaws can be found all over the world, even in Castro's Cuba. It's thanks to them that he succeeds, and by that I mean it's often thanks to their shattered corpses, as it's a hard life being a Network contact. Deveraux's own Network pool is so exhausted that, by the end, he's recruiting family members, leading to a tense moment when one of them goes missing, presumed murdered.
If yours is a Dust game, this could be a useful way of keeping Agents alive. After all someone's got to risk themselves, and many players would rather it wasn't their character. However it does mean that the big action scenes end up going to Network contacts rather than the characters themselves; the Director may wish to impose Stability penalties, or let players play Network characters for that all-important moment when the enemy spy is bearded in his den, just before the vampire counterspies turn up and make steak tartare out of everyone.
In fact let me propose a device I'll call The Topaz Maneuver: If an Agent wants to create a Network contact but has no Network to spend, the Agent can spend Stability instead, provided that the Stability spend is permanent, just as Network spends are permanent. There is no refresh for Stability spent in this way; like Network, this lost Stability can only be bought back with experience spends.
It's also useful for a look at how Solaces can work. In this case Deveraux's Solace is his wife Nicole, who leaves him halfway through the film when he goes to Cuba to commune with his agent and mistress, Juanita de Cordoba. Here we have a legitimately frayed Solace relationship, and see one potential consequence - in this case that she may or may not go over to the enemy, wittingly or otherwise.
