Eyes and Ears: Stasi (Night's Black Agents)

There's a new coffee-table book out for lovers of spy lore: Der Blick der Staatssicherheit (The Gaze of State Security). It's German, but as it's mainly photographs those who can't read German will still get something out of it.

The Stasi were East Germany's version of the secret police. Whether or not you think it was effective probably depends on whether you were born in East Germany and had to live under its regime. Certainly there were a lot of them. Their job was to root out the class enemy, the traitors who betrayed the People's Republic. One of their tools was the humble camera.

As the book points out, camera technology was still relatively new in the 1950s. It took a certain specialist knowledge to use one. However, as time went by and the technology went mainstream the Stasi's cache of surveillance photos increased exponentially. Photos were great. They documented everything. You could prove you were doing a good job if you had a picture of it, whatever it was. It might be a picture of a lightbulb, the same type and manufacture as one which had been thrown onto the roof of a passing car. It might be the faces of three children who kicked their football over the Berlin Wall into East Germany.

It might be absolutely anything.

I would have sworn I'd written about Deutschland 83 before, but apparently not - which is criminal of me. There's meant to be a sequel, Deutschland 86, but I haven't seen it yet. There is a trailer on YouTube but without subtitles it'd only be interesting to the German speakers out there.

I highly and without reservation recommend Deutschland 83 to Night's Black Agents players and Directors, particularly those who enjoy Dust games and who aren't afraid of a little Burn. Just don't get too attached to any of the characters.

When the East German government fell the Stasi did its level best to shred all the records, but the obvious problem was obvious: they had just too many things to shred and not enough shredders. All that paperwork, all those photographs; there was never any chance it'd get done before protestors stormed the gates and took control. It's said that some of the protestors were actually ex-Stasi determined to get hold of their own records and destroy them before anyone could find out about their many crimes. Regardless, in the decades since much of the Stasi's records have been saved, catalogued and made available for research, which is how we end up with books like The Gaze of State Security.

Which brings me to a scenario in two parts:

The State's Last Gasp

The scenario takes place in two different time periods. The first, an extended Thrilling Scene, takes place outside the Stasi Headquarters on 15th January, 1990. This will most likely involve pre-generated characters, possibly based on existing NPCs within your campaign. Any agents' Network Contact, mentor, or nemesis could be involved. An agent can also be involved, provided they're of an age to be a spy in 1990. Their task is to get inside the building and recover the McGuffin - the files.

Precisely what these files are is up to the Director. Perhaps the Stasi had their own version of the Dracula Dossier; not nearly as complete or all-encompassing as Edom's files, but useful nonetheless. Perhaps it's information about Stasi cooperation with agents of the Conspiracy. Blackmail material, photographs of sites which may or may not have been Dracula's castle, personal files of former Stasi who now occupy trusted positions in unified Germany, or whose children are politically or economically significant. It's a McGuffin. It can be whatever you like.

The modern day scenario involves retrieving those files from whoever took them from Stasi Headquarters - assuming they were taken, of course. The files may have been digitized and put on a hard drive, or they may still be in crumbling paper form.

The intent is to play out the Thrilling Scene alongside the main game, so that at the start of the main game none of the players know whether the McGuffin they're chasing was actually taken from Stasi HQ. It might be completely worthless, but there's no way to be sure until after the conclusion of the Thrilling scene.

In a Thrilling chase the stakes are usually life & death, or at least capture or freedom. This time it's different. This time the victory condition is whether or not the players get to decide what happens to the McGuffin. If the 1990s characters succeed in their Thrilling section, then the players do get to decide. If not, then the Director does.

So the start moment would be outside Stasi HQ on 15th January. The protestors are getting out of control, and the guards outside HQ are beginning to panic. Appeals for calm aren't working. Historically the protestors first infiltrated the building at 5pm with tens of thousands getting in through police security. Success in this scene means the players get into the building without anyone getting hurt; failure means they still get in, but there's a scuffle with security and all the characters take -1 damage from the melee.

The target is still 10 - if the characters can build up their Lead to that point, they get the McGuffin. The start point is 3, and the Ability being tested is Infiltration. Unlike the usual Infiltration test this isn't about getting in quietly, unseen - it's more about blending into the crowd, and maneuvering so you can get to where you want to be without being stopped. Potential maneuvers include Intimidation (Death to the Stasi!) Negotiation (appeals for calm and non-violence), even Cop Talk (for dealing with the cops and soldiers).

Then, after the initial Thrilling scene, action moves to the present day. The agents are briefed: their sponsor wants to retrieve the McGuffin from its current hiding place in Germany. A historian claims to have found important files within the Stasi archives, including never-before-seen information about [whatever the McGuffin is about]. Unfortunately, the historian's apartment was burgled and the historian battered into a coma. The agents are to find out who did it, and what happened to the McGuffin.

In order to do it the agents will need to find and talk to X, who is/are, of course, the character(s) in the Thrilling scene. They may also be established NPCs within the campaign; they may even be Network Contacts or mentors. Even if they're usually friendly, this time they aren't. They don't like being reminded of what happened in the bad old days, and especially of what happened back in January 1990.

Action moves back to the Thrilling scene. The characters are in the building now. They need to get past the crowds of rubbernecking protestors, dodging actual spies (did you think the CIA would pass up a chance like this? The Russians? Former Stasi?) and get to the records room. Failure in a test here leads either to a mook Hand-to-Hand combat, (where mooks = P+2, and have Thug stats) or a straight +1 damage to all characters in the scene, players choice as to which. Of course, if the players choose the mook combat they might actually lose the fight, which would terminate the Thrilling scene - which is why they have the option of taking straight damage. The Director is free to rule that losing the mook combat = a capture moment, which has the advantage of keeping the Thrilling action going.

Action moves back to the present day. The agents know a little more than they did before, and they have leads that indicate where the McGuffin is, or alternately, who the opposition are. X, it turns out, is just as interested in the McGuffin as the agents are, and is actively looking for it. Is this is double-bluff? Is X looking for the McGuffin because it's actually lost, or because X is pretending to look for it to confuse the issue? This would be a good time for an Antagonist Reaction, or possibly a straight-up vampire moment, as in 'someone got eaten by vampires! They must be closing in!'

Action moves back to the Thrilling scene. The characters, if they're still free, are on their way to the records room. If caught, they're being dragged to the records room by their captors, who don't dare let them out of sight. The final test is to get in there, get the stuff, and out again.

However, a lot now depends on where they are in the Thrilling moment. If the agents are close to 10, which means they're close to winning, then they're one step ahead of the opposition and have unfettered access to the records. So the only people between them and the McGuffin are a few frightened soon-to-be-ex Stasi spies in the records who are frantically shredding everything they can get their hands on. Treat these as mooks (Thugs) as above, except that any show of force (Intimidation) cows them. They'll beat feet if challenged.

If, on the other hand, the agents have been losing badly and have no hope of getting to 10 or pulling off some game-changing Maneuver, then the opposition in the records room is much tougher. Whoever's their main competition (the CIA? the Russians? Vampires?) got there first. Now the agents have to either brace themselves for a fight, or make a really difficult Infiltration check. If, in previous scenes, they took a lot of damage then fighting isn't going to appeal. Let's hope their Infiltration pools are up to it.

This is the capstone moment of the Thrilling scene, so play it for all its worth. If the Director's really feeling cruel, characters in the Thrilling scene could even be mesmerized or vampirized, which retrospectively means that Network contact or important NPC was always working with the enemy, either as a Renfield, or …

Cue the final scene in the present day. The agents close in on the McGuffin. Maybe they retrieve it or maybe they don't, but this is where everyone decides whether the McGuffin is real or not. If the Thrilling scene was a success, then the 1990 characters retained control of the McGuffin so the players can decide whether it's real or not. Their decision may depend on who has it now; if the agents have it they might prefer it to be real, but if the opposition carried it off then the players may rather it was fake. If the Director decides whether it's real, presumably because the Thrilling scene did not go well for the players, then pick whichever option hoses them the most.

Enjoy!

Person of Interest: Institution M (Night's Black Agents)

Earlier this week the story of Werner Mauss' tax evasion conviction, and two hundred thousand euro fine, broke, and brought the shadowy Institution M back into the international spotlight again. Since he's exactly the sort of person your Night's Black Agents players are going to want to meet, he's this week's Person of Interest.

Mauss, born in Essen in 1940, became a private investigator in the 1960s, and soon started working with the German police and intelligence services exclusively. It's not clear how this happened. His website claims he was trained by a former member of the intelligence services, and that may have given him the contacts he needed to start working with the authorities. Otherwise it's difficult to fathom how an otherwise undistinguished former agronomist and vacuum cleaner salesman in his twenties got the attention of the powers that be. He'd enjoyed success working for insurance companies, but presumably he wasn't the only private investigator in Germany with a decent success record. Reading the site gives the impression that here is a man who is neither shy nor lacking in self-promotion skills, so a certain amount of bluff may have been involved.

He began as a police spy, infiltrating criminal gangs and filtering their secrets back to the police. He claims over 2,000 arrests all told thanks to his evidence, over a forty year career, everything from diamond thieves and tracking down barrels of stolen toxic waste, to the arrest of Red Army Faction fugitives and alleged police murderer Alfred Lecki, in Spain. However from the 1980s he began his South American work, and it is at this point that things get murky.

He started by helping Mannesmann AG in Columbia with troubles it was having over an oil pipeline, but Mann soon found himself negotiating the return of hostages from the ELN. The National Liberation Army -  Ejército de Liberación Nacional - has been fighting the Columbian government since 1964. Its more famous fraternal organization FARC gets all the attention, but the ELN is also a Communist group - Marxist, as distinct from FARC's brand of Marxist-Leninism - and the ELN is no laughing matter. It engages in attacks on infrastructure, like the pipeline, as well as extortion and kidnapping. At this moment it is estimated to have over two hundred people in captivity. The ELN calls it war taxes and retentions; the retentions - kidnappings - are used to encourage payment of the war taxes, or extortion.

Mauss successfully recovered retentions, which got the attention of the German government, at that time Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition. Kohl needed a way to get German civilians back from the ELN, and Mauss was perfectly positioned to play intermediary. Soon Mauss became involved in a more ambitious project, aimed at brokering peace between the ELN and the government. From Germany's perspective this could be nothing but good news; finally the kidnappings and damage to German businesses would end.

The negotiations went reasonably well, but didn't prove as successful as everyone hoped. Moreover the Columbian government was becoming suspicious; was Mauss actually collaborating with the ELN to drive up ransoms, collecting his cut from the kidnappers for this service? He was arrested and jailed for nine months, before being cleared of all charges in 1998.

If he was being paid by the ELN, it was just one of a long list of clients. Mauss' personal fortune grew. His 40,000 acre estate, bought in the 1960s when land was probably a lot cheaper, has been built up into a fenced-off Disney World castle according to the German papers, complete with its own zoo, exotic animals, and the largest private riding hall in Germany. All of which seems reminiscent of a certain film, or possibly more than one.

The Panama Papers leak threw a little more light onto Mauss' world. He had been a busy man, helping the rich and powerful in their business dealings, and in the process built up substantial accounts in Luxembourg and the Bahamas, for which he paid no tax. Mauss claims this is because the funds were actually given him by Western intelligence agencies to help his fight against terrorism and organized crime, even Isis. He also promised a string of star witnesses at his trial, none of whom showed up - and one of whom had died five years prior. Even had all of them materialized, it would have been difficult to explain a slush fund in excess of $50 million whose stated purpose was to fund a Werner Mauss memorial museum after Institution M's demise.

Mauss claims his defense was hampered because so much of his work has to remain secret, covered in a blizzard of non disclosure agreements. All this may be so, but NDAs can also be used to cover up a mountain of bullshit, and in Mauss' case it's difficult to separate the man from the legend. Given the amounts discussed at his trial, his two year suspended sentence and fine seem remarkably lenient. The trial judge said Mauss' lifetime achievement was the reason why his sentence was so light. Clearly the judge couldn't tell the difference between Mauss, the man with $50 million in unexplained funds, and Institution M, the tireless crusader against crime.

So from a gamification perspective, what do we have?

A Night's Black Agents character, clearly. Possibly a mentor; Institution M seems an unlikely Solace. There's a certain murkiness about his whole career that just screams plant - but whose? After all, he buys that 40,000 acre estate in the 1960s, when he's just starting his private investigative career. Even in the 1960s, it's difficult to believe land was quite that cheap. A fictionalized version would have Institution M backed by some shadowy force - but whether it's Dracula or the KGB is an open question. It's easy to see why the Soviets, for example, might want an independent private investigator deeply embedded in the German intelligence apparat, particularly in the 1960s when the Cold War might get hot at any minute. Or the Americans. Or any number of foreign governments, but the Soviets or the Americans are the two most likely to have the funds and the hutzpah.

As a Node he's clearly at the National level at the very least. All those government contacts, in several different jurisdictions; all that foreign travel. He's not what you'd call a bruiser - his legend claims he's only ever fired a gun once in his entire career - but as an information gatherer he's unsurpassed. He's spent his entire career persuading people he can be trusted; someone like that can be more dangerous than an entire tank battalion, in the right circumstances. A Grima Wormtongue with significantly more panache.

It's tempting to write him into any number of stories. For example, Helmut Kohl's legacy has been tainted by the CDU donations scandal, in which cash donations to the party were swept under the rug. It's never been shown that Kohl actually took bribes or benefitted financially in any way, but it paved the way for Angela Merkel's rise. Someone had to be the go-between in the whole unsavory affair; it's not as if Kohl could attend to the matter himself. Suppose for a moment it was Mauss, a man who Kohl had come to know well at least by reputation, and perhaps personally. Or suppose that Mauss was a go-between for Karlheinz Schreiber, the arms dealer at the heart of the scandal, and that Mauss leaked the whole thing for reasons of his own, possibly to avoid prosecution, or to settle some kind of grudge. He could be fictionalized in all sorts of ways, is the point; the man who knows everybody's secrets, but who ensures nobody knows his. Did he use his go-between status to act as Kingmaker, and is now the man behind Merkel - or better yet, the Renfield behind Merkel? Did Germany's pre-war vampire project information find its way into his hands? What awful secrets does his German estate conceal? After all, 40,000 acres is a lot of ground - plenty of space to bury bodies if need be ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Baader-Meinhof (Night's Black Agents)

Unfortunately I've had to end my Dracula Dossier game early due to the sudden departure of two out of four players. As the group hadn't progressed that far, it seemed more fitting to end that campaign and begin a new one with the two remaining players, than it did to struggle on with the two remaining characters. It would have been a different thing had they encountered any Node above the lowest rank, or been involved in the underlying plot.

I thought that I'd take advantage of the recent Field Manual release - I believe it's only for Kickstarter backers in .pdf form now, but the rest of you will see it soon - to switch viewpoints and have them play Edom field agents. For their first mission the characters will be off to Poland to investigate a certain Nazi ghost train. However that's not the focus of this post.

As one of the minor obstacles the characters will have to overcome before digging into the main meat of the narrative, I intend to pit them against Alraune and a few of her friends. Alraune is interested in the ghost train because she believes some records, perhaps even physical samples, relating to her old project is aboard. As for what she's been up to since the war, I intend to get the old Baader-Meinhof gang involved.

Baader-Meinhof is an early form of what became the German terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF),  and I'm taking inspiration from the film Baader-Meinhof Komplex based on the novel by journalist and former Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Stefan Aust.

Having watched it, I came away saddened by the colossal waste, of energy, lives and hope. None of the principals seem inspiring, particularly miserable whiner Andreas Baader, and I found it curious that Bruno Ganz played the intelligence service chief set to capture or eliminate the group. Not that Ganz did a poor job - his performance is, as always, excellent - but I could not forget that four years prior he had captivated the world with his performance as Hitler.  Given that the RAF was driven in no small part by anti-Nazi sentiment, Ganz's performance seemed to verge on stunt casting.

The RAF was - or perhaps is, since there are rumors that it is active again - a far-left group determined to resist the authoritarian German state, controlled at that time by the Hitler generation, if not actual ex-Nazis. "The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it," says Aust. "You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up."

It had a hard-core Marxist tinge to its ideology, and its members trained with Palestinian liberation groups. Dividing itself into Commandos, each group knew very little about the other groups, allowing it freedom of operation without having to worry about its secrets being betrayed by its members, or its organization threatened when its leadership is captured. Even when the founding members Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were captured, the RAF was able to continue operations almost without interruption.

All told, the RAF lasted until the 1990s, by which time it was in its third generation. By that point the original team had committed suicide - or been murdered, depending on which story you believe - and the second generation had bathed in blood during the German Autumn of kidnappings and murders, only to sputter out by 1980. The third generation carried the torch, but this lacked glamour after the collapse of Soviet Russia. It's hard to convince yourself that Leninism is the way forward when the USSR dissolves.

Though the third generation is supposed to have declared itself kaput in 1998, recent bank robberies seem to suggest that the spirit of revolution is not yet dead. Though it's probably reaching for the Viagra right about now, since at best its active members must be in their late fifties if not early sixties.

Alraune, being a semi-immortal with every reason to dislike the German authorities, would fit right in with Baader-Meinhof. So here's where things get fictional.

Alraune joins the group in the 1970s. It accepts her unquestioningly, at least in part because she ingratiates herself with Baader and his girlfriend Ensslin. In return, she uses the RAF to help track down anything and everything the Nazis may have collected or uncovered about her past as a  Abteilung IIIb experiment. She's confident she recovered most of that data back in 1911, but her abiding paranoia is that she missed something, or that some other group was able to replicate the experiment.

One advantage Alraune has is that she can die, and be reborn. On at least two occasions with the RAF she arranged for her current persona to be shot dead in an encounter with the German authorities, only to reappear a short while later as a grieving relative or friend. The great thing about the RAF's decision to divide into Commandos, from her perspective, is that the group finds it difficult to compare notes. This allows her to infiltrate Commando after Commando without arousing too much suspicion, and she uses her own innate abilities to make up the shortfall.

Her current group is the (fictional) Kevin Lynch Commando, named after a dead Irish hunger striker, and she's playing the daughter of a previous incarnation. The Lynch is responsible for two sniper attacks, three kidnappings and one attempted kidnapping, and two bombings. Its last known action took place in 1997, when it was involved in a botched bank robbery that led to the deaths of two of its members. The two dead included Alraune's then-current incarnation, and the robbery failed because Alraune tipped off the authorities. She could see which way the wind was blowing, and thought it was time to bow out.

Though she believes the current German authorities know little or nothing about her, that isn't entirely true. DNA profiling wasn't even on the horizon when she first took up arms in 1970, but things have changed since then, and several samples of her unique biology were retrieved from crime scenes. Also, although in the early days she was careful to ensure that the records concerning autopsies of her dead personas were removed from the record, in 1997 she got a little sloppy. Some biological samples and computerized records escaped the purge. 

Hearing about the Polish Nazi ghost train, and worried that she might have missed something when she first investigated Project Giant in 1946, she decides to go after the train. However she feels she needs muscle so she reactivates her old comrades, claiming to be the daughter of her 1997 persona. Persuading them that there really is Nazi gold in them thar hills isn't too difficult; as former terrorists they're all living hand to mouth and desperate for money. It seems almost poetic justice to them that Nazi gold should pay for their golden years.

And that's where complications ensue ...

Enjoy!