The Bomb (GUMSHOE All)

 

Sourced from American Film Institute

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. ...

Strive for that same moment. 

Let the clock tick.

Enjoy!

Cuban Mysteries & Ladies Vanish

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 ...

Enjoy!