Last time I introduced the concept: a Night's Black Agents game set in Blair's Britain. The next step is to establish the terms of this tragedy. Who's on stage? What do they want?
In tragedy we start with hamartia - the fatal flaw. Often this is hubris, or overweening self-confidence. The essence of hamartia is to miss the mark, to fall short in some way, and in Greek tragedy the one who falls short is often also the one with all the gifts. The hero, the prince, the semi-divine, the one whose fall from grace is all the more poignant because they started so well.
From hamartia the peripeteia results - the reversal of fortune. Somehow the protagonists' falling short causes, inspires or otherwise brings about the tragedy that irreversibly dooms them. Not just them; in a Shakespearean context a tragedy usually brings about the destruction of any number of hapless bystanders, like Ophelia in Hamlet, or Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet.
Though in this instance the better text might be Marlowe's Faustus, in which the hero with many gifts sells his soul for material gain.
1967 film adaptation with Richard Burton and Andreas Teuber
Before I talk about who's on stage, it would be better to set the stage.
Cool Britannia is a 1990s phenomenon that began before Blair's premiership, but Blair made it his own. It's a youth culture movement, Britpop, Four Weddings, Tracy Emin's bed and half a shark all mixed up in an over-sugared trifle. It's all the pent-up optimism that had been smothered in the 1980s, suddenly bursting free. The generation that might have been born in the 1970s but has no memory of strikes or Harold Wilson comes of age.
It's also, incidentally, the early budding of Brexit. If you're 20 in 1997, you're mid-40s, rapidly approaching your 50s in 2021. All those ambitious dreams, fading away, optimism replaced by bile, ready to be persuaded that it's all someone else's fault. After all, it can't be your fault that something which began so well ended so drably. Boris Johnson's a political columnist in the 1990s, dripping his poison. Domenic Cummings is in Russia, trying to build a Sanara-Vienna airline. UKIP's political journey begins in 1993. Nigel Farage is floating adrift, politically, after leaving the Conservatives in 1992, and is trading commodities in the City. David Cameron's an ambitious young wannabe, flitting from the Treasury to the Home Office to the private sector; at the time of Blair's first victories he's working for Carlton Television.
So you've got an early burst of overweening optimism, of pop culture and youthful exuberance - a colorful repudiation of the grey and stodgy Conservativism John Major came to represent. Ultimately the Tories get swept aside by Labour in 1997, as Cool Britannia crests.
That's the stage. Who are the players?
Blair's the Sun King in this narrative, but having the UK PM as an actual person the characters can interact with, and by extension manipulate, is probably counter-productive. This story doesn't need a Sun King; it needs a Gary King.
The World's End opening scene, sourced from SceneScreen
The one with all the gifts, the natural leader of the group - the one who'll become the biggest disappointment. If this is a straight Edom Files game then this is probably one of the Dukes, but let's say it's not. What then?
Whoever this is, it has to be a patron figure, potentially an Icon if we're using 13th Age concepts. Someone who provides not just money but also motivation, a walking, talking inciting incident. The one with a big enough mouth and personality to get the gang together. and back together again after the inevitable bust-up.
This isn't someone who takes attention from the PCs. Whoever this King is, their job is to alert the agents to danger, to uncover hot spots, and ultimately fail. Again, if the Icon rules are being used then this Icon will ultimately be dethroned - and whoever replaces them may not be inclined to help the agents in any way.
Finally, this King needs to fit whichever concept the campaign is designed around, and for a reminder those concepts are:
Mutant: Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.
Supernatural: Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger.
Damned: Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction.
Alien: Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.
Since we have four concepts let's have four potential Kings: the Politician, the Media Mogul (alternately the Financial Mogul), the Tech Guru, and the Priest.
The Politician's a fairly obvious pick: a Blairite, someone who might be on the Cabinet someday but for now is holding down a senior post in the government.
The Media or Financial Mogul is a bit different. An Alan Sugar type, pre-Apprentice, best known for being best known. Sugar himself is busy making computers at this point in his career, but if people know his name at all it's because he part-owns Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Alternatively the Media type is someone high up in the DGMT which owns, among other things, the Daily Mail, the London Evening Standard and the Metro. This is useful because the DGMT is founded by the Viscount Northcliffe and owned by another Viscount, his descendant the Viscount Rothermere who, as fortune would have it, is a very recent appointment in game terms; Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, to give him his complete name, takes over in 1998 when his father unexpectedly dies. So you've got an entrée to the nobility as well as a media mogul in one handy package.
The Tech Guru is probably building one of the many Dot-Bombs in 1997 - though of course nobody knows that yet. Awash with cash and charisma, famous and adored, the Tech Guru flits from Big Moment to Big Moment, and never misses a First Tuesday. Nobody questions anything they say or do. It wouldn't be proper. Their genius means they're always right, a quality they share with Doctor Who - tho Christopher Eccleston won't revive that character till 2005.
The Priest might be an Ultraviolet-type quasi-bureaucrat, (first aired 1998); it's never very clear who Philp Quast's ex-religious is meant to be working for, though there's a strong Catholic vibe to his character.
Ultraviolet trailer, sourced from Thespilian
There is another way to go. Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins, a female priest turned Deliverance exorcist, gets her start in 1998. Women have been able to be ordained as priests from 1992 but none are ordained until 1994, and women as bishops is a contentious issue right up to the first appointed female Bishop, in 2015. Merrily's a useful example because not only does she represent the very new, she also finds herself entangled in the ancient. She'd fit well into a Supernatural or Damned game, where a Philip Quast type is more generic.
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