Let's Hunt and/or Rescue a Target

Hunt. The agents must find someone. 

Rescue. The agents must rescue someone. 

Briefly: the Bankhaus is an investment bank with a murky past and has offices in several major cities, of which the Conspiracy has control over the Paris and Zürich branches thanks to its control over Lisle Klingemann, daughter of the boss and a senior partner in her own right, and Albert Ahrens, controller of the Zürich branch and Lisle's devoted slave. The Bankhaus is mainly interested in software development companies, particularly in jurisdictions within Europe, though it has a significant sideline in mining, especially in East Asia, a holdover from its former interests. 

It has swanky offices, lawyers, a ton of assets on the book and off, and when it makes calls they get answered by senior politicians and members of the financial elite. It almost doesn't matter whether this is a Supernatural, Damned, Alien or Mutant game; all factions are going to want a piece of the Bankhaus whether to get access to its bottomless bank vaults or for more esoteric reasons. 

Mechanically a Hunt is a mirror image of a Rescue operation. They both have broadly the same goal, the only real difference being that in a Hunt you don’t have to worry about bringing ‘em back alive, Frank Buck style. 

Sourced from Randy Waage

In theory a Hunt can lead in several different directions and is often a lead-in to a different operation – a Hit, say. However, a Rescue has its premise built-in; there’s Penelope Pitstop, there’s Dick Dastardly, and you, you’re off to the races. The person you’re trying to Rescue is a walking McGuffin, and you’re trying to Rescue them either because they mean something to you personally or they possess information that will change the world as we know it, for good or ill. 

Sourced from Filmschoolsecrets

Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes is an excellent example. In that film the walking McGuffin, Miss Froy, seems to be a governess returning home to England from her time abroad. In fact she’s a spy who possesses vital information, and it’s because Miss Froy Vanishes that all the action takes place. This narrative’s great conceit is that the heroine, Iris Henderson, can’t convince anyone that Miss Froy exists, never mind is in danger, so she spends a fair chunk of the film wandering about in a kind of horrified daze. It’s a neat idea, but as a plot device it has very limited use. There’s only so many times you can pull the ‘Miss Froy? Never heard of her. You must be dreaming, or drunk, or ill’ gag before it goes off like soured milk. Even Hitchcock abandons that idea about halfway through Lady Vanishes. 

No, most of the time you’ll have to settle for a standard rescue mission. Your agents know who they’re looking for and probably have a rough idea where they are, but that’s as far as it goes. 

Following the Planning, Execution and Aftermath premise, it’s plain that both a Hunt and a Rescue will spend most of their time in the Planning phase. The Execution assumes that they’ve found the object of the exercise and the Aftermath is either going to involve taking someone to safety or fleeing the scene – possibly both. 

Planning is where the thrills are this time.  That moment when your agents don’t know exactly where to go next or what to do when they get there, but they have to keep pushing forward or accept defeat.  

The great thing about both these operations is they have natural plot-hooks built in that lead to future operations. A Hunt can lead to a Hit, or a Rescue, or a Flip. A Rescue gives the agents the walking McGuffin who in turn can lead to almost any operation you care to choose, by virtue of the secret information they have.  

Whereas it’s a bit difficult to use, say, a Hit to lead into another operation. By definition, a Hit is pretty much over as soon as someone pulls the trigger. There’s no obvious lead-in to a Flip operation next week if the object of the exercise is missing a vital portion of their brain matter.  

There are any number of films and television episodes calling themselves Hunt, or the Hunt, or what-have-you, but they tend to go back to the same old well: It’s The Most Dangerous Game, only this time with [liberals/Korean spies/superheroes.] 

Sourced from WJAK Ent

The original 1924 short story was an adventure narrative where Plucky Hero is chased across a jungle(ish) landscape by a crazed huntsman, and most of these narratives assume that the hero is the person being hunted while the villain is the hunter. That isn’t always so, but it’s a very common theme. Which is a bit of a problem from the Director’s POV, since the agents are meant to be the heroes and the target of the Hunt is a villain. Or at least villain-adjacent.  

A very similar narrative plays out in Rogue Male, the 1938 Geoffrey Houseman thriller in which an unnamed sportsman and experienced hunter sets out to see if he can shoot a dictator. Things go wrong, he has to run, and the hunter becomes the hunted. It’s been filmed a few times, and from a plot perspective unfolds much as Day of the Jackal, except this time the Jackal is the one the audience is meant to root for and there’s a longer endgame after the assassination goes wrong.  

Sourced from BFI

Morally speaking a Rescue operation is much easier to plot, since the target of a Rescue is assumed to be worth saving. This doesn’t have to be so; the target could be a mass murderer on death row, and the agents need to get them out because of the vital information they possess. Still, more likely than not the object of the exercise is going to be a more-or-less innocent victim of circumstances, making the operation that much easier to justify. 

Sourced from Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Saving Private Ryan has the advantage of being a hybrid, Hunt and Rescue plot in one. In that narrative the protagonists don’t know exactly where Ryan is, except that he’s in bad country and they need to get him out.  Then follows the Hunt, after which the protagonists have to Rescue the objective in the middle of a firefight. 

There’s an argument for saying that a Rescue or Hunt operation on its own doesn’t make for a compelling narrative. It’s fine in short bursts, but both operations suffer from one-trick-pony syndrome. There are plenty of ways to carry out a Hit. By definition there’s really only one way to carry out a Rescue: you go to point A, grab the object of the exercise, and run like hell to point B before someone catches you in the act. You can add a twist - the object of the exercise is actually a clone of the original with a very limited life expantancy - but a twist only modifies the structure, it doesn't change it.

A Hunt is a little more flexible, and fits in naturally with the Gumshoe find-the-clue basic premise, but it’s difficult to make the Hunt on its own the main plot. After all, the whole point of a Hunt is that you have a tense, even explosive, face-to-face at the end of it. It’s the face-to-face that most people find Thrilling; the lead-up to that moment is just so much froth before the main event. 

For an example of a story that uses both elements to good effect look at the TV series Money Heist. There the whole point of the story is that it’s a Heist, but in between moments of heisting there’s plenty of smaller Hunt and Rescue moments along the way. 

All that aside, let’s go to the Bankhaus. 

Lisle is to meet with representatives from the Conspiracy, and your agents know this is going to happen but don’t know where. Once Lisle meets with those representatives she’ll hand off the McGuffin and then the Conspiracy agents will take it back to the Secret Lair, or whatever plot-relevant location is useful to you.  

Sourced from Movie Predictor

The agents don’t know precisely who they are Hunting and at this point it may be handy to introduce an element of mystery by offering multiple targets. The Eiger Sanction does exactly this, by introducing a random factor. The sinister forces who hire Clint Eastwood to Hunt and then Hit a target don’t know precisely who they want Hit. Just that it’s one of three: the Frenchman, the German or the Austrian. Similarly, you as Director could introduce uncertainty by letting the agents think the Conspiracy contact might be one of several people, forcing them to split their attentions until they think they have identified the right target. 

Once they shadow Lisle to the meet and discover the dilemma, the agents then have to Hunt their target across Europe as they travel to the Secret Location. If they get there, it’s all over; they’ll have delivered the McGuffin. 

Now let’s turn that on its head and say this isn’t a Hunt, but a Rescue.  

Same premise, except now the agents aren’t Hunting people. They’re trying to find out which coffin has the person they want in it, hidden away in cold storage and about to be delivered to a dinner table for slavering bloodsuckers. Pick your coffin. The other two have something nasty in them. The third … It’s the Lady and the Tiger, vampire-style. 

Let’s Flip these operations. Now it’s not a Hunt, but a Chase. It’s not a Rescue, it’s a keep-away or a poison pill, where the agents have to deliver a person to the enemy because they want the enemy to think they’ve captured valuable intel when in fact the McGuffin they retrieved possesses only junk data. 

In this instance the agents are speeding across the continent (on the Orient Express, why not – let’s keep this traditional) and they’ve got with them Erika Donnadieu, the software genius from Kube Group. They’re trying to keep Erika out of the hands of the Conspiracy, but the agents know full well that Erika is actually a plant. The agents’ cunning scheme is to let Erika think they trust her, hand over the secret information/McGuffin/what-have-you, and then let the Conspiracy retrieve her. Except it’s all a ruse; Erika gives the Conspiracy a load of wet nothing and the agents skip merrily off over the horizon, having been Chased and allowed the opposition to retrieve their poison pill. 

Lots of moving parts in that, and it has to be handled carefully – but it could be a lot of fun, played right. 

That’s it for me. Enjoy!