I've mentioned super yachts before, and they're covered in the Resource Guide as a potential Location. Bloomberg recently released one of its puff pieces, Wild Superyacht Secrets I Learned When I Became a Deckhand.
Bloomberg is a pay-to-play site so you may not have access, but there's limited free access and for all I know you're already subscribed to Bloomberg, so here's the article. I'm going to quote from it but shan't post the entire thing. It's fluffy light reading. Brandon Presser is the author.
The Resource Guide has this to say about super yachts:
A “typical” superyacht is 50 meters or more in length, but bigger, more impressive examples can be three or four times bigger. These are the playthings and status symbols of the wealthy, and are outfitted with all sorts of luxuries and opulent facilities. Money is rarely an object here – the yachts are made to reflect the personality of the owner, so one might have a swimming pool and a cocktail bar, another a state-of-the-art satellite communications center and secure offices, and another might have a secret temple to the blood god Zalmoxis and a moon pool for dumping bodies to the sharks ...
The bits in the Bloomberg article that caught my eye are:
Privacy doesn’t exist
A good yachtie isn’t seen or heard—but they see and hear everything. Earpieces, radios, and cameras help keep a constant eye on guests, all feeding back to a control room.
When guests are seen leaving for breakfast, the stewards (or stews, for short) are immediately deployed to the guest rooms to clean. When someone picks mushrooms out of an omelet, the chef makes a note to tweak the dish the next morning ...
Sometimes you need a second boat for prostitutes
Prostitutes are a different story. “We see day-use girlfriends on other boats all the time,” says Christopher Sawyer, the Bella’s chef, “especially in the Med.” He’s even witnessed big spenders fill a secondary superyacht with women to trail the lead vessel, swapping them on and off—10 at a time—throughout the course of several days.
Often a yacht will be rented for two weeks: the first for the family, the second for bachelor party-esque antics. I’ll tell you about the crazy land-bound shopping sprees in a bit—they’re often the wives’ revenge ...
It's all about the tips
When a boat is being chartered, the unspoken rule is for the renter—called the “primary”—to tip each crew member 1% of the total weekly rental cost. For the Bella, which costs $220,000 for seven days (not including food, fuel, and dockage), staff can plan on pocketing at least $2,200 each. The number can be far higher if a group leaves behind what’s left of their food and fuel deposit—30% of the total trip cost—and it’s dispersed to staff. A great summer in the Med could bring in $50,000 worth of tips per person, and then there are those elusive one-off charters where yachties hit it big with a $10,000 bonus.
Incidentally for those out there thinking that renting a super yacht must be easier than buying one, technically you're correct, but take a look at these per-week prices. At the cheap end something like 150,000 Euro, for a 50-m boat. At the more expensive end, half a million per week for an 82-m boat.
So if your agents get a hankerin' for something different, they'd better have Excessive Funds or a compliant sugar daddy. Even the CIA would blink at half a million a week for a fancy show boat.
James Bond picks up just such a sugar daddy in the short story collection For Your Eyes Only. In The Hildebrand Rarity, parts of which show up in the film License To Kill, insanely wealthy sadist Milton Krest invites Bond aboard his swanky yacht on an expedition to find a near-extinct fish, which Krest intends to poison and preserve for his collection. It's one of the rare Bonds without a spy story; Krest is just a rich man, not a megalomaniac in search of world domination. The ship scenes are well-thought-out but infrequent.
The film is stagey, but probably more effective from a spy thriller POV.
Let's go back to the Bloomberg article. Picture the world it paints. Everybody knows everybody's business. Not just the captain and chief officers; the least stew knows your every move. Everybody's on the make. You don't earn those tips by being slow. Faces change all the time. Here one week, gone the next. It's a job for the young, particularly if you're a woman since the industry is extremely gendered and you can age out as a yachtie at much the same rate Hollywood actresses do.
If you're wondering what you might expect on board, let me borrow from Wikipedia:
Yachts above 60 metres (200 ft) are typically built to individual specifications, cost tens of millions of dollars, and typically have four decks above the waterline and one or two below. There is likely to be a helicopter landing platform. Apart from additional guest cabins, which are likely to include one or more "VIP suites" besides the owner's suite, such a yacht will have some or all of the following amenities: indoor hot tubs, sauna and steam rooms, a beauty salon, massage and other treatment rooms, a medical centre, a disco (usually the same space as the sky lounge or saloon, transformed into a dance area when furnishings are moved aside and special lighting activated), a cinema, plunge pool (possibly with a wave-maker), a playroom, and additional living areas such as a separate bar, secondary dining room, private sitting rooms or a library.
Superyachts may be accompanied by a support (or shadow) vessel that carries such items as watercraft, helicopters or other large items that the yacht, itself, cannot readily accommodate. Such vessels range in length from 20 to 100 metres (66 to 328 ft) ...
So that extremely intimate floating world has plenty of quiet corners to get lost in, but all of those corners have cameras and there are attentive staff hovering on your heels wherever you go.
Double Tap divvies up Establishing Shots like these into Extras and Cameos, Clues, Rules Effects, In A Fight and In A Chase. So:
Extras and Cameos: Gym Rat (eye candy), bodyguard, civilian (plaything), civilian (stew/crew), civilian (billionaire), charismatic politician or celebrity, far less charismatic celebrity on a coke binge, talented C-list celeb chef/dancer/singer on hire for the week.
Clues. That pretty young stew Tiffany isn't around any more; is she on the support boat? Somewhere else? Erratic, sinister mumbling from the coke binge celeb. Gym Rat's looking awfully pale and lethargic. A snippet of security camera footage shows something unpleasant. The stews complain that no matter what they try the stains in the disco will not go away. That portrait really is a [insert artist here], allegedly stolen from [museum] - how did it get here?
Rules Effects. Spending a point of Flattery buys the short-term loyalty of any stew. Also, you can find almost anything aboard this boat, so Preparedness test Difficulty drops by 1. However, it's not easy to sneak around when everyone's watching and there are more security cameras than the average prison, so Infiltration Difficulty increases by 1.
In A Fight: Almost every room has something you can use as an improvised weapon, and some of them have actual weapons; antique swords hung on the wall, say, or guns in so-called hidden compartments. That's before you consider the undeniable attraction of braining someone with a Picasso. Hiding the body is more of a problem, if you're going for a stealth run. There's plenty of places to hide the body, but you've got to avoid being spotted by those pesky cameras to get the job done.
In A Chase: Ranges from Normal to Cramped, depending on which room you're in. Obstacles include everything from naked wealthy passengers to fancy tables and chairs in the dining room and an unexpected dip in the plunge pool. Plus, what's really in that playroom? Enquiring minds want to know.
Rounding it off, let's have a Thrilling Interrogation.
From the Resource Guide, a Thrilling Interrogation models the interrogation of a subject where they’re trying to hold out for as long as possible. They might be concealing some vital (but not core) clue.
Now, that assumes one subject. Let's play with multiple subjects: those all-seeing Stews.
Assume the agents want to know what happened aboard the Kismet [whenever it may have been]. The agents have reason to believe something significant happened, but don't know precisely what. They'll need to piece it together from multiple eyewitness accounts, but for that to happen they'll need to track down all those eyewitnesses - wherever they may be. Stews migrate. One might be in Monaco, another in the Bahamas, a third in Florida and so on. Track down enough Stews and successfully interrogate them to win the Thrilling Interrogation.
So where the standard interrogation is one target in one room, this interrogation is multiple targets in different locations, all of them Open for interrogation purposes. Assume a base pool of 12 for the Stews as a whole, and starting Lead of 5 or 7 depending on how difficult you want this to be. Allow the agents the option of bumping their Chase ability with Investigative spends, particularly Flattery and High Society since most of these interrogations will take place in high-end locales.
For a Swerve, assume Conspiracy mooks have caught up with the Stew and will silence them unless the agent intervenes. If the agent successfully defends the target they cut the Lead.
If the agents reduce Lead to 0 then they find out what happened aboard the Kismet. If Lead increases to 10 then they'll never be sure what happened, but maybe they picked up a couple tantalizing hints.
As a potential extra, if Lead = 0 then the players unlock a bonus scene where they play out the events aboard the Kismet on the night in question. The players take on the role of those Stews and other passengers, and the Director gets to cut loose safe in the knowledge that if it's a bloodbath nobody of any consequence ends up dead.
That's it for this week. Enjoy!
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