Dry As Dust (Night's Black Agents)

I was going to talk about something else, but then a question popped up on Ken & Robin's podcast about Dust mode in Night's Black Agents.

It occurred to me that I've been working on just that very thing for a writing project I'd like to see come to fruition, so with that in mind:

Dust Mode

[REDACTED] is written with Dust mode in mind.

Dust tends to be less cinematic than the standard setting. Characters are still badass, but they’re not Jason Bourne badass. Death is an ever-present reminder that mistakes may be forgivable but are also fatal. The vampires and their human allies tend to be much more challenging in open combat.

Dust tends to work well with Mirror mode, that shifting morass of ever-changing loyalties which makes heavy use of the Trust and Betrayal mechanics described on pages 40-41 of the main book.

The following rules modifications are required for [REDACTED's] Dust mode:

·         Remove the MOS rules.

·         Remove Cherry benefits that result in automatic success.

·         Keep Cherry benefits that do not imply automatic success, eg Medical School of Hard Knocks with its bonus point in Diagnosis.

·         Cap Health at 10.

·         Keep the Thriller Combat rules.

·         Use the Guns Kill rules given on page 63 of the main book.

The Thriller Combat rules make combats more interesting, as do Cherries like Martial Arts. Equally the Athletics Cherry gives access to Parkour, which allows for better chase scenes.

The point being that simply having access to those rules does not imply automatic success; just because a character is experienced in Parkour doesn’t mean she won’t screw up the vault.

However the MOS rules and Cherries like Infiltration’s Open Sesame do allow automatic success, and therefore should not be used if the Director intends to play this setting in Dust mode.

There are some grey area Cherries, and the Director should make a judgement call as to whether to use them. Gambling’s Luck of the Devil Cherry, for example, allows the player to make a dice roll at the beginning of the session and decide when to use it. Technically this could allow an automatic success, or an automatic failure.

The Director must decide whether this benefit is applicable in Dust mode. In my Dust games I allow it, on the basis that the Cherry does not necessarily result in automatic success or failure; the Difficulty of the test still needs to be taken into account.  

If Mirror mode is to be used then players assign Trust as usual.

It sometimes happens in Mirror games that the Betrayer reveals that they’ve been working for ‘the other side’ all along, where the other side is often an intelligence agency. In the example in the main book, Beatrice tells her companions Jack and Luc that she’s been working for the DGSE, the French external intelligence agency, all along.

In this setting, it’s also possible that the Betrayer is working for one of the players in this high-stakes game, like [YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT'S REDACTED]. The Director should consider carefully whether to allow this; it may be that aligning with one of the in-game agencies allows the player greater access to in-game secrets.

That said, it’s perfectly in keeping with Mirror mode to have a character announce she’s been bought off by one of the in-game agencies. If the Director wishes to allow it, by all means do so.

Why, Bob? Why?

Ultimately the point behind Dust mode is that it's gritty, more realistic, potentially more fatal. In Anthony Price's novels combat is rare, but when it happens somebody dies. In Price's war novels, like Hour of the Donkey, there's death by the bucketload; an entire unit is wiped out in the first few pages of Donkey. 

So the Thriller Combat rules have their uses. True, they add cinema, but they also increase the stakes, particularly if the Guns Kill rules are used. Plus, the players love Thriller Combat, possibly because it gives them the illusion of control. Never take away anything the players love. It's much better to destroy the things they love, preferably with as much drama and fanfare as possible. Try to arrange a brass band, possibly a few elephants. Elephants add class to every occasion.

That said, the MOS rules can be a problem because they allow the players to eliminate serious threats without rolling dice or spending points. One automatic success later, and the encounter that the Director thought would be challenging is reduced to a brief cameo moment, starring 'pink brain mist' in tonight's climactic scene. For much the same reason, Cherries that give automatic success are also difficult to deal with. Preparedness can be particularly annoying, but there are plenty of others.

Players become more concerned if they know they have to spend points to guarantee success, because their points pools are finite. Sure, at the beginning of the session they have pools for days, and can take on any foe, but they know and you know that, at the midway point, things change. The center cannot hold. 

To quote LBJ - or possibly John Wayne or Teddy Roosevelt - if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. 

Inject anxiety into the equation. Make the players question whether they can hold out long enough. Once they start thinking they might not have enough oomph for yet another gunfight, they'll do their best to avoid another gunfight.

Finally, a word about the Guns Kill rules.

It's one thing to see those rules in print, something else again when the first player drops from, say, 5 Health to -6 in a single shot. The first time something like that happens, prepare for falling jaws to splinter floorboards. Assume Health 10, and two shooters, both of whom hit the target. On an average roll of 4+, the target is in serious trouble. If the total is much more than that - if one rolls 4, the other 6, say, or 2 5s - then the target is already on -6 Health, possibly in the first round of combat.

If that doesn't cause the players to rethink their John Woo ways, nothing will.

Enjoy!

Not Quite Book Review Corner: Firewall (Andy McNab)

It occurred to me, as I read through Night's Black Agents for the umpteenth time, that I had a problem, and my problem was thrillers. I hadn't read enough. Or to be more accurate, the thrillers I read tend to be Anthony Price / Ian Fleming vintage; British, and a little out of date. Determined to update myself, I picked up The Bourne Identity second hand and ploughed through it. Fun stuff, but I hadn't realized how old it was. A 1980s spy fest wasn't updating me. Then I saw Andy McNab's Firewall.

McNab, for those who aren't familiar with his work, is a former soldier and ex-SAS who started writing in the 1990s, and kicked off his Nick Stone series in 1998. I've known who he was for a while - you can't go into a bookstore in the UK without seeing his name on a dustjacket somewhere - but I've not read any of his stuff until now. Nick Stone is his primary protagonist, an SAS turned deniable asset who works all over the globe, for all sorts of odd people. British Intelligence is his primary paymaster -for an insultingly low amount of money, if Firewall is to be believed - but he's willing to take almost any job that pays. In Firewall, the story begins when Stone's hired to kidnap a Russian oligarch, but when things go a bit pear shaped Stone not only sets the oligarch free but ends up working for him instead. Thus begins his escapades in Russia, as he attempts to stop the ROC from getting hold of the West's most sensitive electronic data. Firewall is currently being turned into the movie Echelon, still in production.

It's entertaining. I don't know if I would have picked this up had I not been interested in data mining it for Night's Black Agents, and I'm still not convinced I like McNab's writing style, but I liked it enough to pick up another of his, so I suppose that's a good sign. It's written in what I'm going to call First Person Fucknugget, or FPF for short, and the reason I'm calling it that is I'm firmly convinced that, if Stone ever paused for thought, his brain would explode. I've never read anything quite so much in the present tense; everything's explained from Stone's point of view, as Stone's seeing it, and Stone's constantly moving from point to point to point. It's like reading the adventures of a heavily armed movie camera with legs. It reminded me, oddly enough, of those old Games Workshop Felix and Gotrek novels, where the protagonists exist only to do massive amounts of damage and move on to the next scene.

McNab's thoroughly absorbed the old pulp dicta that, whenever things start to slow down, you should have a man come in the door with a gun, except this time the man's Stone and he's probably got at least two guns and a combat knife. That said, the body count is remarkably low, at least in Firewall. I didn't count, but I think Stone's bag didn't exceed a dozen, all told, not counting miscellaneous Russians who may or may not have died when Stone blew their building up. Felix and Gotrek, by contrast, would have gone through a Skaven army in the time it takes Stone to describe his meeting with his British Intelligence bosses.  

I really liked Stone's fallibility. It didn't strike me until after I'd read it, but Jason Bourne's a bit too perfect. Yes, he has his memory problems, but when he goes into action he doesn't put a foot wrong, even if he does worry himself to death. Stone, by contrast, is a walking disaster. He gets into his latest scrape by screwing up a kidnapping. He reports back to his Intelligence bosses - who don't know he's contracting out on the side - looking for work to pay off his debts, only to be chewed out by his soon-to-be ex boss for the screwups he perpetrated in the last novel. "You trusted the femme fatale, you pillock!" screams the man who's about to be sacked because of what Stone did last time. "Cheery bye," says Stone, and he immediately trusts Firewall's femme fatale, who leads him off on a merry chase. Not only that, but Stone doesn't even get a shag out of it; the support character, the guy with the "I'm going to die tragically, and it's Nick Stone's fault" sign hung around his neck, is the one who gets her into bed. Cue mishap after mishap. Stone scuffles with the American NSA, beats them up because he doesn't know who they are, Stone gets mugged, Stone loses his support character, Stone gets a car from Russian mafia connection, Stone's car is stolen, Stone goes in search of his support character, massive explosions. If ever, as a Keeper, you've wondered how the players will get out of their latest cock-up, read a bit of McNab. There's always a way, if you're willing to get beaten up a bit first.

It's also a fascinating look at what happens in the middle of all this action. There's a tendency, on the Keeper's side, to make everything connected. The guy you meet in scene one will turn up in scene four, that sort of thing. Not so, in McNab's world. People pass through in the blink of an eye, get shot, and vanish, never to be seen again. Most of them don't even have names, or at least not names Stone's prepared to learn. If a civilian's wife gets killed in the kidnapping scene, and the husband's last seen sobbing over the body, that doesn't mean he's going to be an important diplomat who now swears revenge against Stone, as I was half expecting; he's just some random dude who got off the elevator at the wrong moment and walked into a gunfight. That will happen in the real world, but it doesn't often happen in fiction. I think this is where McNab's ex military experience really comes through; not in the technobabble or the action, but in his understanding that, in any action scene, there's going to be chaos, confusion, cock ups and misfires. It happens, and the work of a professional isn't to overcome the opposition, but to overcome the problems that the mission throws up, usually at the worst possible moment.

I'd definitely recommend McNab to anyone wanting to run, or play, Night's Black Agents. I don't say he's brilliant; I say he's useful, and a fun read, particularly if you want a better idea of how a gunfight might play out or what a good chase scene needs. But I'd add the caveat that it only really works if you're running an action-packed game, with mooks aplenty; if you were aiming for something a little more sedate and vicious, like John le Carré, steer clear.