Black Crows (Night's Black Agents)

Black Crows, a terrorist-theme drama created by Dubai-based MBC Group, tells the story of civilians sucked into the orbit of ISIS and forced to participate in terrorist operations. Most of the commentary I've read so far says it focuses on women's stories, but I'm now seven episodes in and if by 'women's stories' you mean 'women get approximately a third of the screen time' then yes, these are women's stories. Mind you, the whole thing is 24 half-hour episodes long so there's time yet.

It's an oddly compelling narrative. The ISIS top brass are portrayed as scheming, cheating, ultimately irreligious hypocrites, from the religious leader who uses a mirror to spy on women bathing, to the children's brigade boss who abuses his authority to have sex with the boys under his care. Even the Emir in charge, probably the most faithful and sincere of the lot and determined to die for the cause, sooner rather than later, has skeletons in his closet. In that respect it's not unlike HBO's Rome, or Deadwood, where even the best have feet of clay. The difference being these are actively evil people with no redeeming characteristics, rather than ambitious would-be Caesars.

Typical of this is a Mufti moment spread over episodes 5 and 6. The Mufti goes to a factory owner making hallucinogenic drugs for sale to unbelievers. The factory boss offers the Mufti a bribe so the Mufti will issue a fatwa that allows him to sell his drugs to Muslims. The Mufti accepts the bribe and then makes a deal with the religious leader. The Mufti will report the bribe to the Emir. The Emir will insist the religious leader kill the factory owner. The religious leader will say he's worried about the dead man's wives, children, and the factory, which might under new ownership sell to Muslims anyway. The Mufti expects the religious leader to insist the Mufti take over the factory, but in the heat of the moment the religious leader takes the factory for himself, earning the Mufti's displeasure.

It's all dealt with in pretty much that way. "I am doing something wicked. Help me do this wicked thing." "I shall! Praise God!" [betrayal.] "Curse you!" It lacks Rome's subtlety, but it has an energy and conviction you don't often see.

By the way, don't think of the above as a spoiler. The plot races from point to point. Faces come and go, plot points come and go. When an episode is only 30 minutes long and you've a lot to do, things like subtlety and character development are sacrificed.

The new intake is a mix of idiots, the deluded and the desperate, from the wife who murdered her philandering husband and fled with the children, to the two high school dropouts who think being Call of Duty champions makes them ideal candidates for martyrdom. Some are sincere, like the surgeon who thinks he's doing what his dying father would have wanted. Sprinkled in the mix are double agents trying to spy on this ISIS cell.

One of the main recurring faces is Abu Omar, a religious teacher who has volunteered so he can find his daughter, who he believes has been inducted into this ISIS camp. He's the narrator who kicks off the action in the first episode, and he sometimes bookends episodes with wise commentary on what happened or is about to happen. He's clearly meant to be the conscience of the series, the one who preaches truth while everyone else lies. He's not your typical hero, being stout and well past the age when parkour is an option, but this is a battle for souls, and for that you need a genuine man of God.

The cast of thousands is a problem. I honestly couldn't tell you who half the cast are, because they never appear on screen for much more than 60 seconds at a time before yielding the spotlight to someone else. Only the most eccentric characters stick in the mind; everyone else blurs. Is that the former dancer? The prisoner? The officer? The this, that, other, tinker, tailor, soldier, martyr? I thought he was dead - no, that was someone who looked like him for 30 seconds two episodes ago. That severed head dropped dramatically on the floor - whose was it?

But then I'm not watching this the way it's supposed to be watched. I'm seeing one, maybe two episodes at a stretch, and I'm meant to be binging the entire series - twelve hours worth of content.

Saudi-owned MBC Group is the world's first private free-to-air Arabic language television network. It specializes in family-friendly material, which means its most extreme content is mid-range action movies and tv shows like Bones, Supernatural and Divergent. Black Crows is a significant departure from its usual lineup, and its anti-extremist polemic is partly the result of extended cooperation with the US State Department.

It's not subtle. When not delivering a very clear message about corrupt extremist groups, it's bathing in gore. But it has a very specific audience in mind: Arabs during Ramadan.

Ramadan is an annual month-long religious observance, one of the five pillars of Islam, in which the faithful are enjoined to refrain from eating, drinking, and sinful behavior of any kind from sunrise to sunset. It's a time for reflection, good deeds and charity - and watching television. Musalal like these are consumed by an eager viewing public who, after sunset, break fast and binge-watch the latest prime-time goodness. No doubt if I had waited the entire day thinking about the last episode I'd watched, or binged several episodes in one go, I'd have a much better idea who was who. It would also help my understanding of the rapid-fire plot.

Yet even though I'm not the audience and am finding it a struggle to watch, I respect Black Crows. It's an Arabic story told by Arabs - less about Islam, more about a civil war fostered by extreme distress. Abu Omar makes this very clear many times; ISIS does not represent Islam.

It has its flaws. The action takes place in an Iraqi ISIS stronghold, yet the story skips over why Iraq and Syria became ideal nurseries for this kind of militancy. Nor does it really explore why people are attracted to ISIS's message. It's difficult to deny the criticism that this is a polemic intended in part to please the US State Department and flatter Western, particularly Hollywood, watchers.

I mentioned Deadwood and Rome. The one thing Al Swearengen and Julius Caesar have in common is that they're both long dead. It's easier to be detached about them, to present a subtle dissection of their flaws and achievements. Perhaps that was always impossible for Black Crows, just as it would have been impossible to make Apocalypse Now, Platoon or The Deer Hunter in 1970. The actors in Black Crow are still getting death threats; one of the major expenses for the producers was security, to stop their shoot being blown up or their people assassinated.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in current events, but Dracula Dossier and Night's Black Agents Directors may find it useful. Particularly if you think of this ISIS cell as a Node; this is how a Node functions, and falls apart.

Enjoy!

Child Spies (Night's Black Agents)

This will be a quick one as Sunday has flown past.

It's based in part on this Guardian article about the police and intelligence services - presumably MI5 though the article dances around that bit - using children as assets in the war on crime and terror. Brief synopsis: a House of Lords committee expressed alarm at the increasing use of children, some under the age of 16, as spies.

The Report on which the article is based can be found here.

'This Order proposes to increase the period for which a person under 18 years can be used as a CHIS [juvenile covert intelligence source] from one month to four months. While the Government state that the rationale for the change is that the one month authorization for CHIS increases pressure on the CHIS and their handlers to get results swiftly in order to justify renewal of the authorization, the predominant tone … was about the administrative convenience of the authorities concerned … The original [report] did not give any context on how such sources would be used or the numbers involved … It gave no indication of what checks might be made on the welfare of the young person not only during the period of surveillance but also in the longer term … We are concerned that enabling a young person to participate in covert activity associated with serious crime for an extended period of time may increase the risks to their physical and mental welfare …'

Unpleasant stuff.

In the Dracula Dossier there's one obvious connection: the Feral Child Vampire (p191). 'Created by Lucy during her brief tenure as 'The Bloofer Lady,' this child vampire hasn't aged since 1894 ...'

Operation FOOTBALL

A joint task force between MI5 and the London Metropolitan Police, Operation Football is supposed to be an investigation of juvenile gangs linked to larger organized groups dealing in heroin, with possible links to terrorist organizations. Several members of youth gang Horror Road have been targeted as part of Football, and the thinking is that flipping these gang members will lead to bigger fish. MI5 is particularly interested in rumors that Horror Road may be linked to a larger group involved in terror acts or the planning of same. One gang member, street name Mayhem, seems to be the primary link, but Football hasn't had much luck with Mayhem so far.

All of which is giving Edom kittens, because Football hasn't found a child informant; it's found the 1894 feral child, and the larger group involved in terror acts is Dracula's Conspiracy. The problem is Edom can't just warn the Football operatives off; it's gone too far for that. Too many people know. There's even talk an MP might raise the issue in the House, in support of (or to counter, whichever) the House of Lords' efforts to bring some order to the current Regulations governing the use of child spies.

Option One: Containment. This assumes the agents are working with or for Edom. Their task is to bring Mayhem in as discreetly as possible, preferably without involving or alerting Football's operatives in any way. Ideally they capture the SBA and provide a suitable corpse substitute - knife crime's a real problem, so sad. Of course Mayhem isn't likely to cooperate - the feral hasn't had this much fun in years.

Option Two: Node Surfing. This assumes the agents are freelancers or at least not connected to Edom. Their job is to follow Mayhem up the chain to the Node the feral's working with. Of course they'll have to do that under the noses both of the Football team and also Edom, which is doing its best to contain the situation without exposing its own operations. Naturally this isn't going anywhere pleasant - the feral might be a very small cog in the larger machine, but the Conspiracy elements it's contacted are bigger fish by far.

Option Three: Bad Day At Work. This option assumes the agents are part of Football and unaware of the larger conspiracy. This is a way to start a campaign, possibly even a Solo Op once the ruleset gets out of playtest. The Football team thinks its about to score a coup, but first it has to justify extending its use of its child operative. While it's doing that, someone drops an explosive bundle of information in Football's lap - its star informant isn't a child, it's been alive for over a hundred years and there are photos, documents or other paperwork to prove it. Who is Mayhem? What is Mayhem?

Enjoy!

Baader-Meinhof (Night's Black Agents)

Unfortunately I've had to end my Dracula Dossier game early due to the sudden departure of two out of four players. As the group hadn't progressed that far, it seemed more fitting to end that campaign and begin a new one with the two remaining players, than it did to struggle on with the two remaining characters. It would have been a different thing had they encountered any Node above the lowest rank, or been involved in the underlying plot.

I thought that I'd take advantage of the recent Field Manual release - I believe it's only for Kickstarter backers in .pdf form now, but the rest of you will see it soon - to switch viewpoints and have them play Edom field agents. For their first mission the characters will be off to Poland to investigate a certain Nazi ghost train. However that's not the focus of this post.

As one of the minor obstacles the characters will have to overcome before digging into the main meat of the narrative, I intend to pit them against Alraune and a few of her friends. Alraune is interested in the ghost train because she believes some records, perhaps even physical samples, relating to her old project is aboard. As for what she's been up to since the war, I intend to get the old Baader-Meinhof gang involved.

Baader-Meinhof is an early form of what became the German terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF),  and I'm taking inspiration from the film Baader-Meinhof Komplex based on the novel by journalist and former Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Stefan Aust.

Having watched it, I came away saddened by the colossal waste, of energy, lives and hope. None of the principals seem inspiring, particularly miserable whiner Andreas Baader, and I found it curious that Bruno Ganz played the intelligence service chief set to capture or eliminate the group. Not that Ganz did a poor job - his performance is, as always, excellent - but I could not forget that four years prior he had captivated the world with his performance as Hitler.  Given that the RAF was driven in no small part by anti-Nazi sentiment, Ganz's performance seemed to verge on stunt casting.

The RAF was - or perhaps is, since there are rumors that it is active again - a far-left group determined to resist the authoritarian German state, controlled at that time by the Hitler generation, if not actual ex-Nazis. "The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it," says Aust. "You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up."

It had a hard-core Marxist tinge to its ideology, and its members trained with Palestinian liberation groups. Dividing itself into Commandos, each group knew very little about the other groups, allowing it freedom of operation without having to worry about its secrets being betrayed by its members, or its organization threatened when its leadership is captured. Even when the founding members Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were captured, the RAF was able to continue operations almost without interruption.

All told, the RAF lasted until the 1990s, by which time it was in its third generation. By that point the original team had committed suicide - or been murdered, depending on which story you believe - and the second generation had bathed in blood during the German Autumn of kidnappings and murders, only to sputter out by 1980. The third generation carried the torch, but this lacked glamour after the collapse of Soviet Russia. It's hard to convince yourself that Leninism is the way forward when the USSR dissolves.

Though the third generation is supposed to have declared itself kaput in 1998, recent bank robberies seem to suggest that the spirit of revolution is not yet dead. Though it's probably reaching for the Viagra right about now, since at best its active members must be in their late fifties if not early sixties.

Alraune, being a semi-immortal with every reason to dislike the German authorities, would fit right in with Baader-Meinhof. So here's where things get fictional.

Alraune joins the group in the 1970s. It accepts her unquestioningly, at least in part because she ingratiates herself with Baader and his girlfriend Ensslin. In return, she uses the RAF to help track down anything and everything the Nazis may have collected or uncovered about her past as a  Abteilung IIIb experiment. She's confident she recovered most of that data back in 1911, but her abiding paranoia is that she missed something, or that some other group was able to replicate the experiment.

One advantage Alraune has is that she can die, and be reborn. On at least two occasions with the RAF she arranged for her current persona to be shot dead in an encounter with the German authorities, only to reappear a short while later as a grieving relative or friend. The great thing about the RAF's decision to divide into Commandos, from her perspective, is that the group finds it difficult to compare notes. This allows her to infiltrate Commando after Commando without arousing too much suspicion, and she uses her own innate abilities to make up the shortfall.

Her current group is the (fictional) Kevin Lynch Commando, named after a dead Irish hunger striker, and she's playing the daughter of a previous incarnation. The Lynch is responsible for two sniper attacks, three kidnappings and one attempted kidnapping, and two bombings. Its last known action took place in 1997, when it was involved in a botched bank robbery that led to the deaths of two of its members. The two dead included Alraune's then-current incarnation, and the robbery failed because Alraune tipped off the authorities. She could see which way the wind was blowing, and thought it was time to bow out.

Though she believes the current German authorities know little or nothing about her, that isn't entirely true. DNA profiling wasn't even on the horizon when she first took up arms in 1970, but things have changed since then, and several samples of her unique biology were retrieved from crime scenes. Also, although in the early days she was careful to ensure that the records concerning autopsies of her dead personas were removed from the record, in 1997 she got a little sloppy. Some biological samples and computerized records escaped the purge. 

Hearing about the Polish Nazi ghost train, and worried that she might have missed something when she first investigated Project Giant in 1946, she decides to go after the train. However she feels she needs muscle so she reactivates her old comrades, claiming to be the daughter of her 1997 persona. Persuading them that there really is Nazi gold in them thar hills isn't too difficult; as former terrorists they're all living hand to mouth and desperate for money. It seems almost poetic justice to them that Nazi gold should pay for their golden years.

And that's where complications ensue ...

Enjoy!     

Not Qute Book Review Corner: Patient Zero, Jonathan Maberry

Before I begin, I'm going to say up front that I liked Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero. I'm saying that now, to balance out what's to come. I picked this up on the free shelf of my local store, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys pulp horror with a modern twist. Night's Black Agents gamers may find it especially useful, particularly since it demonstrates exactly the kind of Vampyramid - and its collapse, as per Double Tap - that they'll be fighting against.

Maberry is a relatively new author. He's been a professional writer since 1978, but it wasn't until his 2006 Pine Deep series - the first of which earned him a Stoker (Best First Novel) Award - that his fiction really started to get noticed. He's also written a string of non fiction and comics stuff, but the book I'm concentrating on here is the first in his fantasy bioterrorism series. There are five in print so far, with two more known to be on the way in 2014 and 2015, and he's been publishing one of these a year since 2009's Patient Zero.

Patient Zero kicks off with an action-packed armed raid on a terror cell operating within the United States. In a pitched gun battle, series hero Joe Ledger puts two .45 calibre rounds into a suspicious crazy who tries to bite him. All seems well, and the corpses are taken off to the hospital for autopsy. Except all isn't well; that dead fella Ledger shot gets up again and starts eating people, causing an incident that eventually results in the death of everyone in the hospital, up to and including a substantial number of the Department of Military Intelligence's best agents. The DMI, anxious to get on top of this ASAP, starts recruiting new blood, and Ledger's top of its list of potential candidates.

Ledger - all together now, in the key of E - is a smart-mouthed maverick loose cannon who gets results. Before he's been on the job ten minutes he's offered a chance to become leader of DMI's new Echo Team - Bravo and Charlie being somewhat dead - so he promptly marches into the room, kicks seven shades out of all the other candidates, and promotes himself commander by virtue of being biggest kung-fu badass. From there, it's a crazy romp through a world of mad science, as the team tries to find out how terrorists got hold of the zombie virus, and to stop whatever mad scheme the terrorists have in mind.

It's pulp in the Sax Rohmer tradition, with the Fu Manchu role taken by super terrorist El Mujahid, and the sexpot Fah lo Suee played by his devious wife, Amirah, who devises the zombie virus. They have the help of self-made pharmaceutical billionaire Gault, who thinks he can use their cause to make a fortune for himself by selling anti-zombie meds to the US after the outbreak. Gault provides the technological expertise and capital, while the husband-and-wife team supplies the genius and the muscle. Will Gault and Amirah hoodwink her cuckolded husband, or is this all part of some greater scheme?

It all hangs together fairly well. It's a little too jingoistic for my taste, and while I'm not going to quarrel with the science, I do have to wonder why on earth Maberry thought it necessary to have a female SAS front-line combat officer as a major secondary character when the SAS famously doesn't accept female recruits. Well, I know why, I suppose; the SAS is the one British regiment American readers will recognize as being reliably badass, and therefore worthy to fight alongside Joe Ledger.  It just seems so silly.

I did enjoy this book, but I'm not sure I'd rush to pick up the rest of the series. If I did, it would have to be on sale; I'd hate to pay full price. In part that's because of the unpleasant itch at the back of my head, that maybe this really is just the Yellow Peril reskinned with a more acceptable - if that's the right word - enemy. But it's also because my heart sank when I realized that Maberry's been publishing one a year of these ever since Patient Zero.

Maybe he does write that fast. Some authors do; I can't remember if it was Raymond Chandler or his contemporary Hammett who said that a writer who doesn't publish a book a year isn't really trying, but whichever it was, the dictum stands. But I can't help feeling that this output is less Maberry's speed than it is the publisher's diktat, much as fantasy authors now seem always to have to write a trilogy rather than just one very good book. Trilogies sell, but more importantly they ensure an author's name is kept fresh, and the revenue stream keeps flowing. Liked Attack of the Killer Cliches? Then be sure to look out for Attack of the Cliche Killers, coming out next May!

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it does seem as if that's the only song the publishers know by heart. It means the story never ends, and anything like structure is thrown out the window. After all, if the story actually had a satisfactory conclusion then there'd be no reason to tune in next week and see how Doc Shadow managed to evade the clutches of Sinister Claw. It also means that plot points get reused, since there really isn't time to work out a new McGuffin or plan out a different style. Villains will come and never really go. 'How did you escape the exploding volcano, Doctor Devastation? Seems like your goose was cooked when the bombs went off.' 'Ah, thereby hangs a tale!'

No. There's precisely where the tale doesn't hang. It sags. It lies there, limp and deformed, bereft of purpose. It might have some superficial appeal, but who's going to remember it a month or so after they finish reading it?