Killer That Stalked New York - Diseases (GUMSHOE)

We tend to think of biological weapons as a modern phenomenon, but in fact the tactic has a very long pedigree. During the American Civil War, for instance, Bermuda's horrified authorities quickly stepped in when it was discovered that a doctor, allegedly acting out of charity, was in fact collecting infected blankets and clothing from Yellow Fever victims, to be sent to the North in hopes of spreading the disease to Union soldiers. The threat of disease is often enough to provoke panic, and no disease was more threatening than smallpox, which is the major plot point of The Killer That Stalked New York.

In this Noir thriller, Sheila Bennet is the unwitting Patient Zero who came back from Cuba with a fortune in diamonds, and death in her veins. It turns out that her boyfriend, who persuaded her to smuggle the stones, has been two-timing Sheila with her own sister. He's able to fool Sheila for a while, and steal the diamonds, but when she finds out, nothing will stop her tracking him down. Meanwhile the authorities discover that Sheila's infecting everyone she meets with smallpox, and desperately want to bring her in, but Sheila refuses to submit.

It's not entirely clear why the authorities want Sheila. OK, she's infectious, but the end voiceover suggests they needed her for some other reason - as if she's the key to a vaccine, or has some vital evidence about where she contracted the disease. All that's a McGuffin, really; the point is, she's important, so they have to chase her.

Smallpox hasn't been a threat since its eradication in 1980, and it's becoming more and more difficult to understand, on an emotional level, the fear it once inspired. Intellectually we can look at its history, see its death count, and know how devastating it can be - but it's like trying to put yourself in the shoes of a soldier in the trenches of the Great War. Empathy only carries you so far; ultimately, you have to have been shot at to know what it truly is like to be shot at.

First comes the fever, and vomiting. Then sores in the mouth, and painful skin rash. Over a period of days this rash becomes fluid-filled bumps, which will eventually scab over and leave scars - assuming you survive. Fatality can be as high as 75%, depending on severity of the rash distribution. The overall rate is closer to 30% fatality. Death tends to occur in ten to sixteen days, accompanied by acute organ failure. If you survive, you're scarred for life, and might also go blind.

Image taken from Wikipedia: Content Providers(s): CDC/James Hicks 

Let's talk gamification.

Given that Trail, Bookhounds and Dreamhounds are all set in the 1930s, it's reasonable to think that a character might have encountered, or contracted, the disease at some point in their careers. It could be an interesting twist, say, to an In The Blood drive - yes, it is in the blood, but because of a smallpox outbreak, not heredity.

However let's take this one step further, and say that a smallpox scare threatens the characters' lives or livelihoods in some way. Let's further say that the Patient Zero is someone the characters know, or work with, or are responsible for. George MacDonald Fraser makes good use of this last tactic in his short McAuslan story, Fly Man, where his narrator Dando has to go chasing over Cairo for his soldiers, while at the same time keeping the smallpox story very, very quiet for fear of starting a panic. Of course, two of the most dangerous have decided to go AWOL, and are armed, just to add to the fun.

'You must go through every club, canteen, dance-hall and gin mill in the in-bounds area,' says his superior, 'I want them all, you understand. No stragglers, nobody overlooked.'

Hilarity ensues.

Bookhounds is particularly useful for this, since the players are likely to have employees or co-workers, but in theory this could happen to any group. Someone you know & rely on has contracted smallpox, but either they don't know it yet, or they have other reasons for staying out of the authorities' reach. Your characters have to track down that person and somehow persuade them to come in from the cold - or the consequences could be dire.

All this, of course, without considering the Mythos. It's likely that anything with a biological makeup can contract diseases, so something like a Fire Vampire is probably immune to smallpox, but a ghoul, or Deep One Hybrid, isn't. Tracking outbreaks of smallpox could be an unusual way of tracking the movements of a ghoul colony, but a potentially more interesting question is, what happens at the fever stage? Suppose, in the case of an as-yet undiscovered Hybrid or ghoul changeling, the smallpox causes uncontrollable mutations, or spontaneous outbreaks of Idiosyncratic Mythos magic, as per Bookhounds. Or the afflicted taps into the Mythos and starts babbling secrets which, under normal circumstances, the poor soul doesn't know. Nurses, relatives, carers, would all be bombarded with secrets tapped straight from Cthulhu's psychic backlash, with consequences too terrible to think about.

This doesn't have to stay trapped in the 1930s. Even in the modern day there's the occasional scare, as with the retained stocks of the virus rediscovered in 2014, at an FDA storage facility in Bethesda. Imagine what the Esoterrorists might do with just the mystic threat of a smallpox bioweapon, or what the Conspiracy might want with strange vials filled with what might be smallpox - or might be something else again. Particularly in a campaign where the vampires have a Mutant background, there may be any number of reasons why the Conspiracy is keenly interested in dusty records of bioweapons research long past. Is this smallpox, or is this the Vampire Genome deliberately mislabeled as smallpox?

Finally, a Bookhounds scenario seed to speed you on your way:

A book scout of your acquaintance has fallen ill, shortly after telling you about a tremendously valuable find. What at first is thought to be ordinary fever is soon discovered to be smallpox, and the authorities are knocking on the characters' door with instructions to inoculate everyone the book scout has come into contact with. It transpires that several other people have fallen ill with the same symptoms, but these people had no contact with the book scout. However they might have had contact with the book. Just what tome is this, and what dreadful secret does it carry within those pox-ridden pages?

That's it for now. Enjoy!

Not Quite Review Corner: City of Mist (Son of Oak)

City of Mist, a detective RPG with mythic elements, is a 2017 Kickstarter release from Son of Oak, lead designer and producer Amit Moshe's brainchild. Fans flocked to give Son of Oak over $100,000 when the studio went seeking crowdfunding, and now the legend has become reality, with print and PDF release. I didn't back the Kickstarter but I was intrigued by the concept, so I bought the PDF version.

Those of you already familiar with Apocalypse World and FATE will find much that's familiar here. The system is blessedly simple. At its very core is a dice mechanic: 2D6, 10+ is a definite success, 7-9 is a messy success, anything else is a fail. Modifiers can be added which affect success or the potential outcome, depending on a character's mythos or course of action - is the character affected by a Status modifier, Facing Danger, Hitting It With All She's Got? - and these modifiers vary to such a degree that it's almost impossible to describe them in one review. A Bastion Mythos, for example, means protection - but protection can mean unshakeable will, a magic shield, immunity from the law, fire resistance, or something else again. Regardless, they each affect the dice mechanic in the same way: 7-9 is a messy success, 10+ a success, anything else a fail, and what actually happens depends on the situation, taking all applicable modifiers into account.

However for the folks going 'hey, that sounds a lot like [fill in blank - Cthulhu Confidential was what I was reminded of]' yes, it does sound a lot like, because it is a lot like. The game's very player-facing, so only the players will ever roll dice, and the players will decide which modifiers apply as well, for the most part. The Master of Ceremonies - City's name for the GM, DM, Keeper, Director, etc - sets the scene and decides the plot, but rarely touches dice or gets directly involved in the mechanics of any scene.

The players are Rifts, or the Awakened. They might look like ordinary people, but at their core they have a touch, or more than a touch, of the uncanny about them. On these mean streets the myths and legends of old are new again; King Arthur might be flipping burgers in a Downtown diner, but he's still King Arthur at heart, and that means he can draw on his Mythos to get things done, if he has to. Exactly what that means is determined by the player during character creation, and is left largely up to the player. Whether this player prefers the Medieval version or something closer to Marion Zimmer Bradley, or something entirely different, is where this King may differ from all the others.

Each character balances Mythos against Logos, or the Legend against mundane Reality. Those fully in the grip of Reality are Sleepers, and have no idea that myths and legends walk the streets. Those with just a little myth about them are Touched, but mostly normal. Those with fifty-fifty myth versus reality are Borderline, while those mostly myth are Legendary. If they go one step further than Legendary, the story overtakes the person it inhabits, and the affected shell then becomes an Avatar.

Becoming an Avatar is a lot like completely blowing a Sanity check in Call of Cthulhu, or one of its many variants, except without the whole, y'know, going insane bit. Well, maybe a little bit insane. See, at that point you become the Mythos and start fulfilling your True Destiny, except now all humanity has been burnt away and you have Godlike powers. You may accomplish spectacular things - so long as the power lasts. However once you burn through your time as Avatar, that godlike power vanishes, and probably takes the character with it, though there's always a chance she might return later.

The Mythos can be almost anything. King Arthur is an obvious choice, but a player could as easily decide to base their character on Excalibur, Don Quixote, Jack the Ripper, a Poltergeist, or pretty much anything else. Any character, item or location from religion, fiction, fable, folklore or otherwise is up for grabs.

Your Mythos helps determine your powers, in a very loose way. The player determines exactly which powers apply, and presumably is guided by the core concept of the character. So someone who takes Don Quixote as a character idea then determines which themes, story tags and other add-ons apply, based on the core idea of Don Quixote. But since Don Quixote embodies many possible add-ons, and since this is ultimately player's choice, one Don Quixote may be very unlike another. Which, to be fair, fits the core concept of the setting nicely - the Mythos is always struggling to break free, and this can manifest in many different ways, thus creating many different potential Avatars.

You'll note that word 'presumably.' Because this game is so very player-facing, I can foresee situations in which a player's idea doesn't really match the story tags chosen for the character. There's enough flexibility here that this shouldn't matter, but that ultimately will depend on who's sitting at the table on the day.

As a side note, the MC should prepare for some friction if the player's chosen concept doesn't mesh with the other players. One player might find a beer-drinking trucker Jesus - after all, religion's on the table, don't forget - hilarious, while the person sitting next to Jesus might go into meltdown at the very idea. Know your players well enough before you start play that you may avoid these situations, is my advice to you.

So why doesn't anyone notice these legendary characters roaming the streets, making beanstalks grow up to the clouds and causing magical mayhem? That's thanks to the Mist, a reality-shaping McGuffin that prevents people from noticing the strangeness all around them. It permeates every element of the City, from the least sewer to the highest skyscraper. A clash between titans could appear, to Mist-addled Sleepers, like a gun battle. It's still a fight, and blood is shed, but it's a fight they understand. Or perhaps they get a very brief glimpse, and then their minds rewrite their recollection of events so everything's explained, or ignored.

Say some hideous event blows a hole in the City, drowning whole neighborhoods beneath a lake. To the Sleepers, that lake's always been there. The ruins in that lake are archaeological discoveries, not evidence of a recent disaster. The people that died when the City blew up didn't die in an explosion; they had heart attacks, or moved away, or never existed in the first place. Only those with a touch of Mythos about them suspect the truth, and even they don't know the half of it.

It's a detective game, but unlike Gumshoe there are no point pools to manage. Instead it's all handled by dice. A dice roll determines how many Clues you obtain, and exactly how you get those clues will depend on the means by which you went looking for them. Did you investigate a crime scene, gossip with the cops, perform some kind of magical ritual, something else? Whatever it may be, you then trade those Clues for answers, and each Clue gets you a guaranteed truthful answer from the MC to one question.

Say you accumulate 3 Clues after scoping out a graveyard. You might then ask, is there anyone in that graveyard who looks suspicious? The MC answers yes, there is; there's a lone figure in a trenchcoat who seems to be lying in wait. The next question is, does that person pose a threat? The MC answers yes, you can see the telltale bulge of a shotgun hidden underneath that trenchcoat. That leaves one Clue unspent, and one question yet to be answered.

Much like GUMSHOE, action is divided into Scenes. There's slightly less structure to the setup here than GUMSHOE fans are familiar with; there's no attempt to divide things up into a particular narrative, or organize things along a spine. Instead the game uses an Iceberg illustrative mechanic to describe story building. Those who see an iceberg know they're only looking at the very smallest part of it, the exposed tip - or, in a murder investigation, the dead body. But go deeper, and who knows what you'll find?

I rather like the Iceberg concept, though I suspect it's in part because it reminds me of a reverse Conspyramid from Night's Black Agents. Rather that build up to a tip, you sink down to a conclusion - but the base idea is the same.

OK, so all that's what the game is. Next question: how does it feel? And does it work?

It feels a little tricky, to be honest. There are some games that anyone can play, and there are some that depend very much on like-minded people with similar skill sets deciding to play. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, is a game everyone can get behind, regardless of experience or ability. The quiet player who doesn't like to roleplay and the exuberant talker can each have as much fun as the other, because the game has ways in which both can access the fun. Whereas Wraith is a game that, by virtue of its mechanics and setting, is only ever going to appeal to a certain kind of player. If not everyone at the table is into it, that will make things awkward for everyone. Which is not to say that Wraith is a bad game - it's one of my favorites - but I have to bear in mind that not every gaming group I'm in is going to be happy playing Wraith.

City of Mists is in the latter category. The quiet player is probably going to be intimidated by the setting and the core mechanic, since it requires such a heavy player investment, and relies on roleplay to really sing. Whereas the exuberant talker will leap on this with cries of joy, because the game actively rewards talking and roleplay. As MC, you need to bear in mind that not everyone at the table will be happy with City of Mist, and that may determine whether you decide to play at all.

The other big issue I have is that, as far as the setting's concerned, there's not a lot of there, there. With a concept as strong as this - new Legends rising from old stories - you'd expect the City to be as compelling, but a lot of the nitty-gritty is actually left up to the players and MC. I suppose this is unavoidable; anything this player-facing will depend heavily on player input, so the designers have to leave a lot unsaid. Plus it allows the MC to base the campaign's city on pretty much anything, from Prohibition era Chicago to modern day Monaco, Victorian Paris or anything in between. But it didn't light my imagination afire when it described the City in a series of Tropes like The Run-Down Apartment, The Public Park, The Ruin, or The Historic Residence.

I suppose my disappointment is partly down to the noir problem. I convinced myself this was a way of telling noir stories with a Mythic edge. I even convinced myself noir was in the title, or the subtitle, of the main book - which, of course, it isn't. Noir is mentioned in the Kickstarter pitch and it comes up a couple times in the main book, but there isn't, say, a chapter dedicated to film noir or any real exploration of what that style of storytelling might mean to the campaign.

See, if you aim for a noir style, then the City plays a major role. The setting - the situation - is larger than any of the characters. If the characters fail - and they frequently fail - then, more often than not, they are crushed and beaten by the situation. There's a reason why one of the most famous and oft-quoted lines in cinema is  'Forget it, Jake - it's Chinatown.' At that point Polanski bows to the central tenet of noir: the good guys don't triumph in the final reel, and anything resembling victory is spattered with blood.

But with City of Mist the setting can never be larger than the characters. By definition the characters are larger than life, in every possible sense. Moreover as embodiments of Mythos working towards Avatar status, failure seems remote. It can be a tragedy in the same sense that Macbeth is a tragedy, but Macbeth crushes dynasties and lays waste to everything around him, whereas Robert Mitchum, say, maybe punches a few goons before being gunned down. The scale's all wrong for noir. It's like trying to reshoot Casablanca with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead, and a few extra car chases and explosions.

There is a Campaign Book, and that may solve some of the issues I've mentioned, but as I've not seen it I can't comment. I would say that, if I was picking this up on a whim - which is exactly what I have done - I'd expect the main book to solve pretty much all my problems, and the add-on to give me even more stuff. I wouldn't want to go spending another $50-ish in the hope that the add-on fills holes found in the main book.

I feel as if I've spent a lot of time griping, so let's talk about the good stuff.

The interior layout is very good. I could have lived without quite so many 'coffee stains' on the pages, and I couldn't help but be reminded of a comment made by a blind gamer a while ago at YSDC, that these non-essential images may look great, but they play hell with PDF readers used by the sight-impaired. The artwork and imagery really helps sell the core idea, which is a plus.

The core idea is gorgeous. It reminds me very much of Vertigo back in the day, with the Sandman, Lucifer and the rest. For those going Fables, Fables, Fables, yes, I can see where you're coming from, but I was never that fond of Fables. It never clicked with me.

The designers are very generous with their content. There are two scenarios and plenty of downloads available, for free, on their site - no doubt thanks to cash-handy Kickstarter backers, but still, it's a welcome addition.

I said before that this is a game that will appeal to a particular group of people, but I'll also say this: if you happen to be in that group, this will become your favorite game. The concept and rules are so simple that anyone can understand them with minimal explanation, and once you're there, it's easy to fall in love with this big, bad City. It's also a pretty decent choice for someone's first tabletop RPG, in that the rules are so simple they won't intimidate novices, and the concept's so strong that everyone will have an idea of what they want to do five minutes after the MC explains the setting.

It's also not a bad choice for someone's first time behind the MC's screen. A lot of would-be Keepers, Dungeon Masters and world-builders charge in bull-headed looking for something unique, something they can make totally their own. They want to be master of all they survey, and it's just not good enough if all they survey is a couple of hamlets and some hapless hobbits. They want a grand canvas, worlds to save - or damn - and the highest possible stakes, for the greatest heroes ever known. City of Mist provides that grand canvas, with a system and setting robust enough for any idea to flourish. Whereas if that same neophyte decided Dungeons and Dragons, say, was the way to go, they'd have to become expert in a relatively complex system, and then decide what kind of story to tell within that system, and then decide whether they need any of the many extra mechanics Dungeons and Dragons supplies to make that story work, and then become masters of those extra mechanics ... and so on. It's a lot of effort, is what I'm getting at, and the great thing about City is, you, as MC, don't need to kill yourself with work to have a good time. The players will be doing a lot of that for you.

Do I recommend City of Mist? Yes, though not without reservations. Will I play it? Oh, yes. In fact there's a one-off I should be designing for some folks who are down for Christmas, and I think City is an excellent choice for them.

Is it for everyone? No - but if it's for you, then it's going to become a permanent part of your RPG landscape.

Enjoy!

Top Cop (Mutant City Blues)

I've always had a soft spot for Pelgrane's superpower cop setting Mutant City Blues, but I could never make it work.

In my head it sounds like a cross between Powers and The Wire. Particularly The Wire; there are actors in that show - Michael K Williams, Seth Gilliam, Lance Reddick - that I have seen elsewhere, but have never seen give finer performances than in HBO's crime epic. I'd like to think their characters would feel right at home in Mutant City.

So with that in mind let's talk a little bit about what makes this setting function, and to do that we're going to spend some time dwelling on film noir.

In this kind of campaign, the city is just as important a character as any of the players. More so, because the city was there before them and will be there long after they are dead and dust. In The Wire we see small parts of that bigger picture, when McNulty and Bubbles school Shakima Greggs about Omar's cousin No Heart Anthony, or Prop Joe talks about how the house he lives in is one of the first available to black families in that neighborhood. These stories go straight to the long term history of the setting, hinting at a bigger universe that the individual characters are often blind to, so focused are they on their own problems.

At the same time we can also see where the city is going. The whole of Season Two is dedicated to that idea. In that season we see how the docks which once made Baltimore a premier port city, and which fired up the blue collar union workers that kept the docks running, are being beaten to death by forces beyond their control. No matter how bitterly they fight, their defeat is almost inevitable - and in fact they guarantee it by making alliances with drug kingpin the Greek, taking his money to fund a docks revival, but only ensuring that when the deal comes to light the union, last defender of the docks, gets shut down.

Every city has these stories. It's like watching the march of advancing armies, or following the spread of trade across a map. Superficially things seem the same, yet over time the changes become more and more apparent until finally all you can see are the changes. Oddly enough it may be more useful to use a different system, like Microscope, to plot out this city history, particularly if you're not too keen on doing a lot of research. [for an actual play version of Microscope, look here.] But the point is that there is a larger story playing out around the characters, and that story takes decades - centuries - to complete.

To give just one example, consider MV Empire Windrush, the ship that gave its name to an entire generation's emigration to the UK in general and London in particular. This shifting migration pattern is an event whose consequences can have far-reaching effects for your campaign; you could base an entire story arc around something like this. Or consider the Syrian refugee crisis now, and ask yourself how much more challenging it would be if even a tenth of the people incarcerated in holding camps or swept from crisis to crisis had super powers.

Which brings me to my next point: that in film noir the world is ambivalent, and often thoughtlessly cruel.

People we think of as heroes or protagonists seldom win outright. They may prevail, but there are casualties. Moreover the alleged heroes often lack heroic characteristics, or are so deadened by their experiences that they no longer care.

My go-to film, the one I point at as the perfect example of film noir, is On Dangerous Ground with Robert Ryan. There's one scene in particular that gets me again and again: this one, where Ryan's cop corners a stool pigeon early on in the film and makes him talk. That look on Ryan's face - disgust, anger, despair - is distilled cruelty, but it's difficult to say whether that cruelty's inherent in his character or something that's been stamped into him over time.

If you want your Mutant City game to stand out, that's the standard to aim for. The city, and by extension the game world, does not reward kindness. Soft hearts and do-gooders get ground up in this city, and well-meaning projects meant to make a difference sputter into nothingness, leaving only a sense of futility behind.

Again, The Wire Season Two: there isn't a single person in union boss Sobotka's crew who doesn't want what's best for the docks and the people who work there, yet everything they do only hastens the destruction of everything they care about. Even the gangsters don't get what they want; in Season One the Barksdale Crew is set up as the one to beat, yet over time the Barksdales crumble not because the cops win but because the Barksdales lose.

Yet finally, there is hope. Again I turn to On Dangerous Ground. About a half hour in Ryan's character is cornered by a co-worker, after Ryan's beaten yet another suspect half to death. "How do you do it?" Ryan screams. "How do you live with yourself?" To which the other cop replies, "I don't. I live with other people. This is a job like any other. I do it the best I can. It's never enough, but I still do it."

That's the payoff. The city is a main character, yes. It will be there after the characters have come along, absolutely. But if the characters surrender, if they let circumstance and misery grind them down until nothing's left, then they've lost. The battle isn't to control the city. It's to control themselves, to find some satisfaction in the work and in life. Otherwise the only thing they have to look forward to is nothingness.

I've not spent any time talking about super powers, even though this is a super powers game. That's because it isn't the powers that make this setting work. It's a police procedural first, a supers game second. You shouldn't worry too much about the super side of things; that will take care of itself. What you need to concern yourself with is the police procedural, and I hope this post will help you do that.

Enough from me this week. Enjoy!

Hitchcock & You (GUMSHOE, various)

As a film nut I often seek out interesting movie houses, film festivals and big screen entertainment, all the more because I don't get much chance to do so down here. I thought this time out I'd examine some classic cinema, and to give this a gaming twist I'd see which of these films is best suited to a Director/Keeper.

I'm going to concentrate on the films of British genius Alfred Hitchcock, whose big screen career stretches from the early days of silent film up to the 1970s. I may dwell on some of his slightly more obscure works, since I figure you've probably already seen Psycho at least once. I'm not going to consider films in which he wasn't the director, and if you're hoping I've somehow found one of his lost films, sorry, but no. I'm not that lucky.

Without further ado:

Sabotage (aka The Woman Alone). This 1936 drama stars Oskar Homolka as saboteur Karl Anton Verloc, Sylvia Sidney as his wife, John Loder as heroic detective Sergeant Ted Spencer, and child actor Desmond Tester as young Stevie. Karl is an agent for hire who agrees to carry out acts of sabotage in London. We first see him tampering with a power station, temporarily knocking it out. He's expecting a big reward for this but is disappointed to learn his bosses aren't best pleased, as his stunt did nothing except make London laugh when they wanted London terrified. This leads them to demand greater things of Verloc, and they supply him with a bomb which Verloc is supposed to plant at a train station. However Verloc gets nervous and, thinking he'll be suspected, he gives the disguised bomb to young Stevie to deliver instead. This kicks off one of the most suspenseful scenes in British cinema as Stevie, all unknowing, tries to get to his destination in time. We watch him get lost, get delayed, and all the while are screaming inside because at any moment the bomb could go off.

• Bookhounds Keepers need to see this film for its accurate and fascinating portrayal of London in the 1930s, particularly the street scenes.
• As an espionage thriller it's remarkable for three things: 
• Its portrayal of its antiheroes as misanthropic, greedy men, which is a more accurate depiction of actual traitors and spies than usually seen on film.
• Its portrayal of hero Ted Spencer, as a reminder of how we used to imagine the heroes of this kind of thriller. An archetype soon to be replaced by the likes of Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, Spencer is more a Bulldog Drummond type, but unlike the stock hero he abandons his principles pretty quickly when Mrs Verloc, the woman he loves, is in danger.
• The bomb-maker, who has to be seen to be believed. 

The Lady Vanishes. This 1938 tale sees Margaret Lockwood as carefree dilettante Iris Henderson thrust headfirst into mystery and death aboard a luxury train that might as well be the Orient Express. She's travelling across Europe back to England so she can marry a blue-blooded idiot, but falls in with octogenarian Miss Froy, a charming old lady who vanishes mysteriously. Iris' attempts to find out what happened to her are frustrated when all her fellow passengers say they've never heard of or seen Miss Froy, and Iris is accused of making the whole thing up. Knife-wielding magicians and sinister bandaged men follow in quick succession, as Iris dodges assassins and soldiers in her search for the truth.

• If you've ever wanted to run Horror on the Orient Express, this is the movie for you.
• The first appearance of comedy stock British characters Charters and Caldicott, who appear in several other films including wartime espionage drama Night Train to Munich. A master-class in how to make supporting characters memorable.

Saboteur. A wartime drama which kicks off with the immolation of a bomber factory, and one of the most cold-blooded cinematic killings of all time. As the factory goes up in flames, two would-be heroes rush to the rescue. The villain passes one of them a fire extinguisher, which is immediately grabbed by his friend who rushes in to fight the blaze. Unfortunately for him the extinguisher's actually full of gasoline, and he dies in a ball of flame. Admittedly as an assassination it's a bit cheesy - how did the villain know to have a trick fire extinguisher on hand at that exact moment? - but as a piece of cinema it's undeniably effective. Which is emblematic of the movie as a whole; because it's filmed in 1942 when everyone's at their patriotic height - filming started two weeks after Pearl Harbor - there are any number of Truly Heroic Moments And Brave Speeches, but that doesn't prevent this being a brilliant film. The climax alone, atop the Statue of Liberty, is worth the price of admission. 

• If Lady Vanishes is a master-class in making supporting characters memorable, this is a master-class in villainy. One character in particular, whose name I shan't mention as it might spoil his entrance - one of the best introductions of a major character I've ever seen - is superb. Charming, persuasive, and utterly ruthless, his defense of totalitarianism is chilling. Moreover for a wartime film about sabotage there isn't a racist Japanese or German stereotype in it, which is remarkable in and of itself.
• As luck would have it I'm reading Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, and thought this was worth repeating: 'The real horror of Himmler is not that he was unusual or unique but that he was in many ways quite ordinary, and that he could have lived out his life as a chicken farmer, a good neighbor with perhaps some antiquated ideas about people.'
• Hitchcock's known for gorgeous set-pieces, but that moment atop Lady Liberty is undoubtedly one of his best. Better, I'd say, than a very similar moment in North By Northwest, though the latter film is more well known.

Torn Curtain. Paul Newman plays nuclear scientist Professor Armstrong in this 1966 drama, who plans to defect to the Soviets so he can continue research into an anti-ballistic missile defense system. Julie Andrews is his fiancé, who has no idea he's about to defect until the scheme is well under way. When she discovers his plans she follows him to East Berlin, and has to decide whether she'll stay with him or return to the West. Except Armstrong's got a hidden agenda ... Cue a race to East Berlin with the police and security apparatus hot on their trail.  This isn't one of Hitchcock's best loved spy movies but it has a lot of charm, not least because it hews faithfully to reality as opposed to overblown espionage tropes. Hitchcock took inspiration from the Burgess & Maclean defections when he made this one, especially the fate of Maclean's wife who went behind the Iron Curtain with their three children a year after her husband defected.

• Night's Black Agents Directors wondering what Dust mode looks like on film need look no further. One scene in particular, the murder of a security man, epitomizes the whole gruesome, exhausting business.
• Ever wonder what it's like to create Thrilling Contest scenes that aren't car chases or acrobatic parkour leaps from rooftop to rooftop? See how you can have a theoretical physics Thrilling Contest, or a cat-and-mouse with two buses.
• The race to the border is the very essence of an extended Heat contest, right up to the final moment when someone machine guns the plot.
• Much like The Lady Vanishes the supporting characters are memorable and interesting in their own right. My hat's off to unnamed tetchy ballerina played by actual ballerina Tamara Toumanova; now there's someone you have to feel a little sorry for!

Topaz. On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a French intelligence operative is asked by an American contact to investigate potential NATO leaks within the French government. In doing so he runs foul of Topaz, a French spy ring that's been funneling NATO military secrets to Moscow. He has to use every trick in the book in his search for the truth, and even then it might not be enough, as his shadowy opposite number Columbine, head of Topaz, is so well connected that not even the strongest evidence may be enough to get him arrested, never mind convicted. Frederick Stafford, a spy film veteran, plays the heroic French lead Andre Deveraux, and at the time critics blamed his performance for the film's poor box office. Having seen the film I don't agree; his performance wasn't stellar, but he's unfairly blamed. No, to my mind the larger problem is that an audience used to Bond level heroics can't get behind a spymaster who actually behaves like a spymaster - that is, he gets other people to do all the dirty work. So the action scenes and heroics belong to other actors, and Stafford shows up only when the big scenes are over and done. Even at the end - and there are several possible endings depending on which version of the end you watch - he isn't directly involved. All the big moments belong to other actors.

• Night's Black Agents directors and players both need to watch this, to get a better understanding of Network. Deveraux is a master of this very important Ability; his agents and catspaws can be found all over the world, even in Castro's Cuba. It's thanks to them that he succeeds, and by that I mean it's often thanks to their shattered corpses, as it's a hard life being a Network contact. Deveraux's own Network pool is so exhausted that, by the end, he's recruiting family members, leading to a tense moment when one of them goes missing, presumed murdered.
• If yours is a Dust game, this could be a useful way of keeping Agents alive. After all someone's got to risk themselves, and many players would rather it wasn't their character. However it does mean that the big action scenes end up going to Network contacts rather than the characters themselves; the Director may wish to impose Stability penalties, or let players play Network characters for that all-important moment when the enemy spy is bearded in his den, just before the vampire counterspies turn up and make steak tartare out of everyone.
• In fact let me propose a device I'll call The Topaz Maneuver: If an Agent wants to create a Network contact but has no Network to spend, the Agent can spend Stability instead, provided that the Stability spend is permanent, just as Network spends are permanent. There is no refresh for Stability spent in this way; like Network, this lost Stability can only be bought back with experience spends.
• It's also useful for a look at how Solaces can work. In this case Deveraux's Solace is his wife Nicole, who leaves him halfway through the film when he goes to Cuba to commune with his agent and mistress, Juanita de Cordoba. Here we have a legitimately frayed Solace relationship, and see one potential consequence - in this case that she may or may not go over to the enemy, wittingly or otherwise.  

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Cthulhu Confidential (Trail of Cthulhu, Pelgrane)

I own a boardgame I never play. It's called B-17: Queen of the Skies, an old Avalon Hill title from 1983. It's designed as a solo experience but you can, with some modification, enjoy it as a two-player game.

You fly a B-17 from an airfield in Britain to somewhere in Occupied Europe or Germany, in hope of bombing a strategic target back to the stone age. It kinda works. If you can throw yourself into the experience guiding a heavily armed flying colander, engines sputtering, crew bleeding out, all the way back to its home airfield after a raid is a lot of fun.

I stopped playing when I realized that, mechanically speaking, all I was doing was rolling D6s time and time again. I didn't choose my target: that was a D6 roll. I didn't choose where I was in the formation: that was a D6 roll. I didn't choose the weather: that was a D6 roll. I definitely did not choose when the flak opened up on me or enemy fighters attacked: that was a D6 roll. When the enemy attacked I chose which MG gunners fired back and when. That was it. Resolving what happened next was a D6 roll. What was hit, and how badly, was a D6 roll. And so on.

B-17 colored my opinion of solo and one-player games for decades to come. I stopped looking for one player fun. B-17 was, in a very real sense, why I got into RPGs in the first place: RPGs offered multiplayer, where several like-minded souls got together and invented adventures.

Along comes Cthulhu Confidential, the One-to-One experience. One Keeper, one Player.

Hmmmm, I think.

HMMmmmmmm.

It's a lot of fun.

It's basically GUMSHOE, so if you're used to that system then you'll find little to puzzle you here. The investigative and general abilities are pretty much as you remember them. The only investigative ability that's in any way unusual is Inspiration, which has been used by GUMSHOE before but not often. Also, Health is gone, passing off some of its minor poison-resisting and other active test functions to Athletics. There's a new general ability, Devices, that replaces Mechanical and Electrical Repair. That's it. If you've ever played a GUMSHOE title before, you know what to expect.

For those of you who haven't, or who need a refresher: investigative abilities are used to gather clues. The core or really important clues are always given free. Investigative abilities are used for all the extra bits of information you may need either to make more sense of what's going on, or to give you some advantage. Investigative abilities never fail. You always get the information; it's what you do with it that counts.

General abilities are used when failure is a real possibility. Driving a car in a high-speed chase? You'll need to make a Driving test. Failure may mean you wreck your car, success may mean the enemy wrecks their car, and so on. General abilities aren't about getting information. They're about action, and the consequences of action. Also known as the Mother of Mercy Moment.

There are two new mechanics which will, I suspect, take some getting used to. One is the Push system. You start the game with four Pushes, and can gain more through play. Pushes are used in combination with investigative abilities, when the player wants to gain a specific extra advantage. Say your character has been dosed with a Mickey Finn. Spending a Push in combination with Chemistry allows your character to concoct a simple antidote, using only the contents of an ordinary medicine cabinet. A minor but important advantage, since succumbing to the Mickey probably doesn't end the story. Instead succumbing shapes the narrative in a particular way. With the Push, on the other hand, other options open up: you could fake unconsciousness, either to spring an ambush or to gather information while goons stand chatting over your 'sleeping' carcass. Or you could run away, or come up with another idea. In short, you have more choices with a Push than you have without one.

As a mechanic Pushes remind me strongly of Nights Black Agent's Cherries, and may have the same problem. Cherries are great but I've noticed players, particularly inexperienced players, sometimes forget to use them. This can lead to issues when a character who ought to have the advantage in an encounter doesn't use her general abilities to their best effect because she's forgotten she has Cherry freebies coming to her. The Keeper may want to remind the player about Pushes, especially first time players.

The other is the Challenge test system. In GUMSHOE up to this point a test is usually part of an extended sequence. Take combat: any one combat might involve several different consecutive rolls as the combatants dodge, shoot, engage in hand-to-hand, always chipping away at the target's Health stat. Even a fight with Mooks might want several different tests in the same scene. Now it's all one test, or Challenge, in which the active party - you, the player - have to roll equal to or greater than a specified Difficulty.

Sound familiar? Well, it ought to, but here's the rub: it's all one roll per Challenge. There's no 'OK, that didn't work, so let me try this,' or 'OK, he's hurt, now I'll press the advantage with my other general ability, or just keep going with this one.' Nope. All one roll. With one, two or possibly three D6.

Aha! Something new has been added!

Up to now general abilities were a kind of high-stakes poker match, in which the player wagers a certain number of points from his starting pool in hope that whatever is bet, plus a die roll, is enough to beat the Difficulty of the test. In One to One there are no pools. The player often only has one D6 at his disposal, with no modifiers, and the Challenge's Difficulty number is the X factor. Some Challenges are more consequential than others, so this X factor may change dramatically from Challenge to Challenge. It's a straight-up test, in which the result can be Advantage, Hold or Setback.

Gaining an Advantage is a success with extra benefits, probably conferring an Edge which can be used in future Challenges. A Hold is a no-harm-no-foul situation, in which you don't get exactly what you want but at least didn't get a penalty either. A Setback is a failure, probably accompanied by a problem of some kind.

You'll note I said problem, not Unqualified Failure, OMG, Your Character Is Dead, Dead, Dead. Like all GUMSHOE products One-to-One is all about the story, which means the scenario usually isn't written in such a way that a Challenge failure early on kills the story. A character can still die - messily, unpleasantly, weeping like a baby - but the scenario designer would prefer that this happens towards the end of the narrative. If the player deliberately orchestrates things such that death at the halfway point is the only logical consequence of the player's actions, c'est la vie. But it's unsporting, darn it, and not the hallmark of a true gentleperson.

Oh, and those Problems I mentioned? They're fun. O so very much fun. Problems have counterparts, Edges, but Keepers and Players may come to love Problems more.

Problems and Edges are story beats. Edges give you some kind of story benefit, usually in a specified scene or circumstance. Problems give you a story problem to overcome. Since Confidential is a Noir setting each character starts with a 'free' Problem, such as:

Heedless. You never met a warning you couldn't ignore. Take a -1 penalty on all Sense Trouble checks. Discard this when you gain your first Sense Trouble Setback.

So in other words, discard Heedless when you do something that almost certainly earns you another Problem. Cunning.

You can see why the player may come to love Problems. Edges are just temporary bennies, but Problems push you towards doing something, in narrative, to deal with your Problem. This in turn may lead to other story complications, and so on and on. Problems help shape the narrative, in other words. Edges simplify the narrative, and film noir has never been about simplifying anything.

Each time your character earns an Edge or a Problem you are given a card describing that Edge or Problem, which you keep until such time as it's expended or resolved. At that point, and only at that point, do you discard the card. This means you can still have Problem cards in your hand when the scenario ends, and that can lead to all kinds of long-term consequences depending on the nature of the Problem. Or short-term, if the Problem leads to the character's demise.

Incidentally for those Keepers out there thinking 'that sounds like a lot of cards,' yes, it does, and yes, it will be. Capital Color, one of three scenarios in Cthulhu Confidential, has 42 individual Problem cards unique to that scenario and 18 Edges, or 60 scenario-specific cards total. As Keeper when designing one of these scenarios you should bear in mind you'll need to come up with roughly the same number, not including generic Problems and Edges the character might earn through actions, and thus Challenges, not anticipated in the scenario's design.

It seems like a chore, but really isn't once you get the hang of it. These Challenges all have roughly the same structure, and there's a handy cheat sheet for working out how to scale an individual Challenge up or down. After you've done this once, probably sweating bullets over each Challenge, you'll find the next set of Challenges with their consequential Problems and Edges much easier to create.

"But what about the Mythos?" I hear you scream. "I want to be driven completely bonkers!" So you shall, with Mythos or horror-based Challenges. These work in broadly the same way as other Challenges, in that Edges can be earned and Setbacks leave you with a Problem that has to be dealt with before the scenario ends. Except that where most Problems can be resolved mechanically - like Heedless, which is discarded after earning a Sense Trouble setback - these Problems are usually dealt with narratively.

Take a scene in which you find the decapitated corpse of a young actress. This non-Mythos horror-based Challenge can lead to a Setback, earning not one but two Problems. The first is mechanical:

Decapitated Starlet. The image of Leona's head at your feet burns itself to the inside of your retinas. Whenever your mind wanders, a vivid memory of it assails your consciousness. -3 penalty on all General or Mental Challenges. Counter by Taking Time to submit to narcosynthesis under the care of a shrink.

The other can only be dealt with narratively:

Vengeful. If you find out who killed Leona, you will be compelled to avenge her, risks be damned.

Where Decapitated Starlet can be dealt with by the player without incurring further risks or Challenges, Vengeful sets the player up for a future Challenge. In this particular example it's presumed that the Challenge will occur at some point during the scenario, so there's no long-term mechanical consequences to complicate the character's life after the scenario concludes. There may be narrative consequences, but not mechanical.

Mythos Challenges are a little different. As with Decapitated Starlet a Mythos Challenge can, on a Setback roll, result in Problems and Extra Problems. These Mythos Problems can be dealt with by spending Mythos-based special Edges but, if not dealt with before the end of the scenario, the character may suffer significant narrative consequences that must be dealt with before any other unresolved Problems are dealt with.

For example, in a Challenge where your character discovers blasphemous, Mythos-inspired artwork, rolls a Setback, and earns this Problem:

Censorious. Mythos Shock. To maintain your sense that the painting hasn't affected you, you must take any measures, no matter how mad, to destroy it once its usefulness to the case has ended. It doesn't count as admitting anything if you set it on fire and never, ever think about it again.

The character must, if this Shock isn't countered by an Edge before the end of the scenario, destroy the painting. The potential narrative consequences are significant, but then so is permanent incarceration in a place with soft walls and crayons.

I've rabbited on long enough, particularly on this Sunday of all Sundays. So, scores on doors: should you get Cthulhu Confidential?

Keepers definitely should. It's a very interesting sourcebook with three complicated, compelling scenarios, each of which has its own intriguing Noir protagonist. There's more than enough here to help you design complex narratives of your own. You'll want the .pdf as well, even if you're a die-hard book lover, since you'll need all the Generic Problems and Edges for easy printing.

Players should think very carefully about this. If you're into collecting all things Cthulhu then yes, please. However over 180 pages of this 311 page book are scenarios, and unless you're the kind of fella who likes spoilers you may find this troublesome. That said, once you've played through one or more of the scenarios this stops being an issue, at which point you should rush to your friendly local whateveritmaybe and buy this book.

It's a lot of fun, is what I'm saying.

Enjoy!