One Job Too Many (Mutant City Blues)

A quick recap from last post: 

Do they like the idea of being cogs in a mincing machine? A Pinkerton-style go-between, acting on behalf of less-than-innocent clients - perhaps even doing things that a more moral character would recoil at? ... Then their clients are going to be powerful, unscrupulous people who want what they want whether or not they deserve it, because in that kind of world nobody deserves anything. They only keep what they can take.

Do they like the idea of being the clever, morally centered Poirot, Marple, Monk or Rookie? ... Then their clients are going to be innocent people looking for something that rightfully belongs to them. No grey areas, only moral absolutes, and the adventure along the way involves solving puzzles, not playing several different gangs of crooks against each other and hoping to come out on top. In fact solving the puzzle is the only reason this kind of detective exists ... 

I'm going to go one step further and borrow a writing trick used by Agatha Christie: no matter which fictional portrayal you shoot for, write the first chapter and the last chapter first, and then fill in the blanks in the middle. 

Christie famously went so far as to write the last novels for Marple and Poirot years in advance - in the 1940s, decades before publication - sealing them in a bank vault until time came to publish them. She wanted to make sure she had the final chapters for their lives finished and ready for publication, so if she died in the Blitz there'd be definite endings for their narrative. 

From your perspective as Moderator, what this means is you set down how you think it may end and how you know it will begin, and then work out the bits in the middle. An RPG is slightly different from a murder mystery, in that it's always possible the crime won't get solved. Or at least, that it doesn't get solved the way you think it will be. 

In Night's Black Agents this final scene is sometimes called the Capstone, and is a climactic moment unto itself. It's an opportunity for the villain to prepare a final encounter, where the PCs prevail or die trying. In Mutant City Blues the PCs are less likely to die trying (this being a more heroic setting than NBA, with fewer fatalities), but they can still fail, and even dramatically fail. 

In a Mutant City Blues game it may be prudent to prepare two potential Capstones, loosely described as Villain At Bay and Villain Triumphant. Villain At Bay assumes the main antagonist's plot is basically foiled and they're on the run; Villain Triumphant assumes the main antagonist's plot is on the verge of success, and only a last-minute Hail Mary from the PCs will get this done.

So with that in mind the base outline is this: prep an opening scene, prep two potential Capstones, and then work out the middle bits. In this example I'm not going to work out the middle bits; that's up to you. I'm just going to prep the opening scene and two Capstones. I will include a 'what the PCs don't know' section in place of the middle bits.

In this example I'm going to draw up two mysteries, one for the clever and morally centered, and one for the cogs in the mincing machine.

Maltese Falcon opening

Let's start with the cogs.

In that kind of game there are plenty of fish bigger than you, and they all have agendas that don't necessarily agree with your own. In the Maltese Falcon, for example, Sam Spade has to dodge the district attorney and the detective in charge of the case, Dundy. This isn't because the DA and Dundy are bad people, necessarily; they're just not on Sam's side. 

In a regular MCB game, for example, the PCs may think Lucius Quade is on their side. Or they may give it no thought at all, and simply assume Quade isn't someone they have to worry about. In this kind of game, Lucius Quade definitely isn't on the PCs' side. That doesn't mean Quade's a bad person. He's just not a reliable ally, nor is he a neutral party. He has his own agenda, and he pursues it whether or not the PCs will get hurt as a result.

The same applies across the board, and applies double when actual law enforcement, whether federal or local, is involved.

Snatching Jimmy

The PCs are approached by a distraught father, Jamshid Mirwani, a restauranteur. He says his young son Jimmy has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers say they'll kill Jimmy if Jamshid doesn't pay them $400,000. Jamshid has an audio recording of the kidnappers torturing Jimmy, which he'll give the PCs. Jamshid is on bad terms with his ex-wife, May (formerly May Quade, Lucius' second ex-wife) but doesn't think she has anything to do with this. She'd never torture her own son. Would she?

Jamshid wants the PCs to act as his representatives, either to find Jimmy or to pay the ransom and get Jimmy back. Except Jamshid says he hasn't got $400,000; people always think because he married Quade's ex he must be loaded, but that just isn't so.

Villains Triumphant: This assumes either the kidnappers get paid or Jamshid gets his hands on the heroin somehow. The handoff takes place in a multi-storey car park in a neglected part of town famous for suicides and suicide attempts, sometimes called Jumper's Corner. After getting what they want the kidnappers will kill Jamshid as a warning to others, but they'll let Jimmy go. Jamshid's body will be dumped off the car park; it might look like a suicide at first, but he may have been blasted off the car park or influenced to jump.

Villains At Bay: This assumes Jamshid's shenanigans are revealed and the kidnappers traced before things get out of hand. Maybe May remembers seeing her errant husband with them, or can tell the PCs more about her ex's criminal past. Alternatively Jimmy, an emerging mutant himself with Dream powers, may contact the PCs remotely. This scene takes place at the kidnapper's safe house, a run-down biker bar with a lot of security cameras. 

What the PCs don't know: Jamshid is a drug dealer who was supposed to be arranging a shipment of heroin. The kidnappers are Jamshid's former business associates, a biker gang, and Jamshid ripped them off to the tune of $400,000. That's why they took Jamshid's kid. Jamshid didn't intend to rip them off, but the customs agent he thought he'd bribed demanded more money Jamshid didn't have. Currently the drugs are sitting in an impound depot, but if Jamshid could meet the customs agent's demands he could get the heroin, fulfil his promises to his former business partners, and get Jimmy back. The kidnappers are heightened (various combat-related abilities).

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, starring Daffy as Duck Tracey

OK, now for those morally centered types.

The great thing about this kind of private investigator is you can fit one almost anywhere. You can't picture Miss Marple going head-to-head with Caspar Gutman; it wouldn't sell. Clean-cut teen sleuths straight out of BubbleGumshoe wouldn't last ten minutes in a film noir.  

But if the characters exist in a broadly moral world, in which certain things can be taken for granted - cops represent the law, right triumphs over wrong, people are basically good at heart - then you can have stories where someone who bakes cookies for a living gets mixed up in a murder case, and solves the crime. You could have a lot of fun with Mutant City BubbleGumshoe.

These stories tend to be murder mysteries, probably because the earliest versions - the Christies, the Sayers - were murder mysteries. You could have a burglary or an art forgery as the center of attention, but somehow there isn't the same zing. 

With that in mind:

The Missing Mandala

A mandala made of coral, gold, and turquoise, on loan from a British university museum, is stolen from an art gallery and an art student, Rachel Wu, murdered - presumably by the thieves. The owner of the gallery, Sandra Cohen, suspects it may have been a Chinese-backed heist-to-order, as the mandala was part of a collection of artefacts looted from China by the British in the 1800s. However, there's reason to think heightened criminals may have been involved. The university professor who delivered the mandala, Thomas Duncan, is very upset; this is the second time it's been targeted by thieves, and he only agreed to lend it on assurance that the gallery's security was top-notch.

The gallery was broken into shortly after 11 pm. The thieves clearly had detailed information about the gallery and came in via a skylight, bypassing security. There's not much to go on from the security cameras. What nobody can explain is why Rachel Wu was there at all. From the looks of things she interrupted the crooks as they were making their getaway, but although Rachel did work at the gallery there was no reason for her to be there at that time of night.

Rachel was a B-Category mutant (moving patterns on her skin that resemble cherry blossom tattoos) and was shot to death at close range - close enough for the weapon to leave powder burns. Whoever did it would have been spattered with gunpowder and minute drops of blood. 

Villain Triumphant. Thomas Duncan has managed to avoid detection and is on his way out of the country. This scene assumes the PCs catch up to him at the airport, as he's about to board his flight. He's sent the fake mandala by FedEx to his university address and still has the receipt on him. He won't be quick to cause trouble, not in an airport full of people, but he does have that pesky self-detonation power ...

Villain At Bay. The gun's been found where Thomas hid it, in a vent duct in Sandra Cohen's office. It has sufficient forensic evidence to link him to the killing. The forensic remains of his self-detonation in a locked gallery storeroom might give away his escape plan. Thomas is desperate to get away, but can't fly out. This scene may happen at a flop hotel, an interstate bus depot, train station or similar. 

What the PCs don't know: The mandala is a fake. Thomas had it made and delivered it to the gallery intending to steal it himself; he tried a similar stunt before, but it didn't work. His intent was to sell the real mandala and then cover up his crime with a phony robbery. The fly in the ointment was Rachel Wu. She noticed something was wrong with the mandala but rather than tell someone her suspicions she decided to inspect it closely after hours, to make sure she was right. She was, but she also caught Thomas in the act of 'stealing' the fake mandala. The gun was hers; she had a concealed carry permit. In the struggle she was accidentally shot and killed. In a panic, Thomas hid the weapon on-site.

Rachel has an uncle, Duncan Wu, who has low-level organized crime connections and who will actively involve himself in the investigation; Duncan's no criminal, but he looks suspicious enough to maybe fit the heist-to-order mold. 

Sandra Cohen is deep in debt and owes money to some less-than reputable characters, which may throw suspicion on her, but Sandra has nothing to do with Thomas' heist. 

As an out-of-towner with Dynamite powers Thomas had to register himself on arrival, so his abilities are a matter of record. His scheme was to use his inside knowledge to fake the theft (he insisted on learning everything there was to learn about the gallery's security system, and Sandra was happy to oblige) then explode, sending his particles off into the ether to reconstitute later.   

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Private Investigations (Mutant City Blues)

The recent Mutant City Blues reboot offers the option of playing as a heightened private detective in this brave new world of superpowers and those who abuse them, and that got me thinking: just what is a private detective, anyway?

The oldest examples are crooks who went straight - sort of. Men like France's Eugène François Vidocq, a rakehell, soldier, convict, probable forger, duelist and martial artist who turned his life around and, in 1811, joined the cops. Later, when the Sûreté decided in 1833 that it didn't need recruits with a criminal history, Vidocq formed his own investigative agency, Le bureau des renseignements, made up mainly of ex-cons like himself. Larger than life and full of devilment, Vidocq became the subject of plays, books, gossip, and several films, from the silent era to modern day.

His English equivalent is Jonathon Wild, Thief-Taker General, who operated roughly a century before Vidocq but without the latter's successful career. Less a crook gone straight, more a crook gone even more crooked, this gang boss decided that, in the absence of a police force, he'd act as the police. This allowed Wild endless opportunities for bribe-taking, racketeering and bounty hunting. Wild would offer to find and return stolen goods, and then extract cash from the thieves and the putative owners, threatening to expose criminals or actually turning them over for the bounty on their heads. It all came crashing down when Londoners started taking corruption seriously, for the first and possibly last time, and Wild went to the gallows in 1725, later ending up on the dissection table. His skeleton is possibly the most famous one in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons.

In the United States the most famous private investigator is Allen Pinkerton, a cooper (maker of barrels) who by chance discovered a gang of counterfeiters, informed on them, and as a result became a Chicago police detective. From there he went from strength to strength, eventually becoming Lincoln's spymaster in the Civil War, a union buster and a terror to train robbers and bandits. The agency he founded still exists today, and became synonymous with private investigation - the Pinkertons.

The earliest fictional detectives tend to operate along these lines, albeit slightly more respectably. Poe's Auguste Dupin is a man born to money but now poor, a kind of gentleman detective who can operate in both the respectable and less-respectable realms because he belongs to both, by training and circumstance. He shares this quality with Sherlock Holmes, whose antecedents might be of the squirearchy but whose financial constraints lead him to make money the best way he can. 

Holmes' creator Conan Doyle was himself comfortably middle class, but spent his early life in straitened circumstances due to his father's alcoholism and spent much of his early career bouncing from failed job to failed job before finding a niche in fiction. Whereas Dashiell Hammett left school at age 13 to work, eventually becoming a Pinkerton himself and, later, a soldier, before ever committing a fiction, and Hammett's protagonists are fiercely independent fixers and private agents. His contemporary Raymond Chandler had a decidedly rosier early life, but again financial woes intervened and he turned to writing to solve his cash problems, creating fictional characters like Philip Marlowe, world-weary intermediaries between the rich and those who would prey on the rich.

    Big Sleep trailer. Sourced from Movieclips

Agatha Christie meanwhile had a conventional early life unmarked by the kind of financial and social hardships that created Hammett, and thus Hammett's Sam Spade. So her characters are themselves fairly conventional. Christie's Poirot operates in a world in which he can specialize in the detection of murder, and Miss Marple doesn't really have to earn a living at all but finds herself mixed up in murders regardless. Whereas Spade has to do what he can to get by, and will take, say, $200 if you offer him, say, $100 to find a mysterious missing objet d'art.

Already we can see a stylistic break. For Hammett's Spade, how is less important than who, and why is usually self-explanatory. There's no question about anybody's motive in the Maltese Falcon, nor are there exotic poisons and doubts about time of death. Floyd Thursby is shot to death, Miles Archer is shot to death, all out in the open rather than behind locked doors, and the central question isn't how or why they died but where the Falcon is right now, and who has it. 

Whereas Christie's Poirot, Dorothy Sayer's Sir Peter Wimsey and others of their type are obsessed with how and why, and less concerned about who. The Mysterious Affair at Styles features a wealthy woman poisoned with strychnine, and the central question becomes how that poison was obtained, whether or not people knew about the dead woman's altered will, and how the poison was administered. Novels like these care about who did it only because someone has to have done it; the prize for working out the puzzle is finding out who, but the puzzle is the point, not the murderer.

So a Hammett protagonist navigates an uncertain world of changing allegiances and lies, where a Christie protagonist lives in a fairly certain world where crime is more of a logical conundrum than an opaque mist of bluff and counter-bluff.  You'd never get a speech like Sam Spade's at the end of Maltese Falcon in a Christie novel. A Poirot never needs to explain himself, or examine his own motives, because Poirot knows his motives are pure. A Sam Spade knows his motives are anything but pure. Yet that speech is the bleeding heart of Maltese Falcon. There is no heart in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

From these early beginnings come others, operating broadly along similar lines - the specialist, the clever amateur, the genius. Seldom are they former crooks, like Vidocq or Wild. More often they are former detectives, like Spade or Poirot. Very often they're neither of those things but happen to wind up near a murder regardless, whether they bake cookies for a living or have a famous detective for a father. The more respectable the author, the more likely it is the detective will be someone either respectable or formerly respectable but now in straitened circumstances. The crime is nearly always murder, and when it isn't murder to begin with it usually becomes murder by the third or fourth chapter. A far cry from The Maltese Falcon's snatch job gone wrong, Dupin's purloined letter, or Holmes' Beryl Cornet. Finding the McGuffin isn't anything like as important, in this kind of narrative, as unmasking the killer.

The world these fictions live in is quite nice, on the whole. Someone might threaten them or try to hurt them, but as a general rule folks are pleasant, innocent creatures and they're not at the mercy of circumstance. If anything, it's the detective's job to ensure the world remains pleasant for everyone, and when it isn't they step in to make it so.

Every so often someone like Walter Mosley comes along and the detective returns to his roots as a middleman in a larger, dangerous world. In that kind of fiction nobody's completely innocent, least of all the protagonist, and often the dividing line between success and failure is vanishingly slight. However the Mosley's of this world are the exception rather than the rule; in fiction, there are far more Marples than there are Easy Rawlins. 

Devil in a Blue Dress, from Sony Pictures

So after all that rambling, the central question: who or what is a private detective?

The private detective is a hired agent whose job is to help their client achieve a particular goal. A contractor. A middleman. It's not their job to build a legal case against a guilty party, but to build the case their client wants them to. Equally is it not their job to denounce anyone from a pulpit. They work for pay, like everyone else, and their day-to-day resembles more a researcher's than a gunslinger's.

When your detective is a man like Thief-Taker Wild the client is usually someone who wants to stifle potential scandal or avoid a criminal conviction, and will pay any amount of money to make sure the truth never comes out. When your detective is someone like Vidocq then the client is someone who has been failed by the authorities, possibly because of political shenanigans, and will pay any amount of money to get what they want - whether or not they deserve it. Dashiell Hammett's protagonist in The Glass Key, gambler and racketeer Ned Beaumont, is built along Vidocq's lines, as is Sam Spade of Maltese Falcon fame. Philip Marlowe leans more to Thief-Taker Wild, particularly in The Big Sleep.    

If your detective is someone like Allen Pinkerton then everyone's operating within the law, but the law is a very big tent and can include intimidation, beatings, political twisting and shady deeds. Immoral, but not necessarily illegal. Or, if illegal, the kind of illegality that is seldom prosecuted and almost never successfully prosecuted. Mosely's Easy Rawlins operates in this kind of world. 

If your detective is a Dupin, Holmes or Poirot then not only is everyone operating within the law but also the law has a decidedly moralistic tinge. Poirot can say, in all seriousness, that he disapproves of murder - and he does so because his creator disapproves of murder. In much the same sense someone might disapprove of opening a liquor store on Sunday, or of spanking children, or of sexual behavior. Murder is wrong and people who do wrong things are punished. Q.E.D. Most modern police procedurals - The Rookie, Law & Order, especially L&O SVU - fall in this category. There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys are supposed to win. 

 

The Wire

If you're looking for strict realism in your game then you're probably going to want to lean towards the Pinkerton model. Vidocq and Thief-Taker Wild belong to an earlier age, when there is very little law to speak of and almost as little civil authority. Modern society couldn't survive without some kind of organized leadership. Someone's got to be the glue holding this rickety bucket together, after all, and it's not going to be the PCs - they're too busy getting into fights and looking out for Number One. 

There's a lot of talk about Invincible right now, for obvious reasons, and while I've not watched it through I have noticed something odd about the series - and perhaps it holds true for all modern superhero comics. In Invincible, there really isn't an organized leadership of any kind. Buildings blow up and civilians get vaporized, but there's no suggestion of a civil authority, no real government at all. It's almost as if the planet is just a pretty backdrop for selfish costumed jackasses who want to party. 

A private investigator has to operate within society's rules, a superhero doesn't. A private investigator has to worry about getting arrested, about keeping her nose clean and not getting caught doing something shady. If the PI doesn't worry about those things then the best they can hope for is to have their license pulled, at which point they're not a PI any more. The worst case is time in jail, if not the death penalty.

In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade spends a fair amount of time keeping the cops at bay, and calling his attorney to make sure he and his client don't get railroaded.

The same holds true for your PCs. In any private investigator game the cops, the civil authority, the mayor's office and whoever else are all going to get in the PI's face. This might be because the PI is holding onto explosive information that could embroil the city in scandal, or it might just be because the PI is a pain in the ass who doesn't play well with others. Which would explain why the character isn't working within the HCIU. Either way, one of the main antagonists in any PI game is going to be the city itself, whether or not the character has a decent relationship with the cops at the local precinct.

The Pinkerton-style world is a little different from the Miss Marple and Poirot model. In a Pinkerton world the authorities may actively work against the investigator, our of malevolence or protecting their own interests. At best the authorities passively block the investigator at every turn, or make things more difficult. There are constraints on what the PI can do, and the authorities enforce those constraints.

In the Poirot kind of fiction the investigator - who doesn't hold any kind of license and is the very definition of a free agent - can do as they like, because the authorities are assumed to be on their side. They share goals, because this is a moralistic world in which people who do bad things are punished, and the law is implicitly on the side of those who do good. Poirot might have a friendly or not-so-friendly rivalry with the detective in charge of the case, but Poirot's relationship with the law as an institution is always sound. 

Take The Rookie. Nathan Fillion's John Nolan is always going to be on the side of righteousness, because that's the essence of his character. If tempted, he will never eat the apple. Thus his relationship with the LAPD is always going to be good, even when (at the end of the second season) it appears to everyone as if Nolan's gone rogue. The Rookie's LAPD is always on the side of the angels, and Nolan is basically an angel at heart, so the LAPD will always back Nolan's play.

Fictions like the Rookie might ape Chandler and Hammett in some superficial respects - after all, they all take place in Los Angeles, the heartland of detective fiction in America - but they differ in fundamental ways, which you as Game Moderator should bear in mind. The most fundamental of which is that, in a Rookie fiction, bad guys are always punished by the righteous, while in a Hammett fiction bad guys may or may not be punished, and if they are it's seldom by the righteous. 

That in turn will determine the shape of your campaign going forward, which means it's a vital part of your Session Zero. What kind of fiction do your players lean towards? Do they like the idea of being cogs in a mincing machine? A Pinkerton-style go-between, acting on behalf of less-than-innocent clients - perhaps even doing things that a more moral character would recoil at? Falsifying evidence, theft, bearing false witness? Then their clients are going to be powerful, unscrupulous people who want what they want whether or not they deserve it, because in that kind of world nobody deserves anything. They only keep what they can take.

Deadwood

Do they like the idea of being the clever, morally centered Poirot, Marple, Monk or Rookie? The kind of person who, like Poirot, refuses to act on behalf of the unworthy 'because I do not like your face?' Then their clients are going to be innocent people looking for something that rightfully belongs to them. No grey areas, only moral absolutes, and the adventure along the way involves solving puzzles, not playing several different gangs of crooks against each other and hoping to come out on top. In fact solving the puzzle is the only reason this kind of detective exists. That's why Holmes examines cigarette ash and Miss Marple interrogates vacationers at a Caribbean getaway. It's implicit that the criminal is bad and must be punished, and because it's implicit nobody's going to be examining their motives or delve into psychological angst over them. That just leaves the locked-room question as the meat of the narrative.

Knives Out

Anyway, that's it for this week's discussion. Next week, some Mutant City Blues scenario seeds ...

Darling Anna (GUMSHOE, Night's Black Agents, Mutant City Blues)

You may or may not be aware of Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey. As Delvey, Russian expatriate Sorokin scammed the rich and famous out of substantial amounts, by pretending to be a German heiress. Her scam wasn't the most sophisticated con game ever. She relied on charm and chutzpah, plus a little forgery, persuading people to lend her cash or pay her way. She racked up several hundred thousand worth of debt, and tried to get a $22 million loan to fund her Foundation. It was never going to last, and now she's been found guilty in court, sentence being four to twelve years, with the likelihood of deportation after release.

M Allen Henderson's Flim-Flam Man  is well worth looking at. Henderson lists these bunco traits:

• Inclined to hold a low opinion of humankind, although this inclination is usually well-hidden.
• Charming and personable.
• Persistent and thick-skinned. He won't let a little failure get in the way of eventual success.
• An actor who can fake emotions better than he can feel them. His act seems realer than real because he half believes it himself.
• Not exclusively a con artist. He has engaged in, and will continue to engage in, other businesses, both legal and illegal, especially sales.
• Proud of his ability to outsmart others, and expects others to outsmart him.
• Lacking in conscience. 
• Disrespectful of police and others in authority.
• On the move, changing residences and businesses frequently.
• Fond of showing off and is a big spender.

Sounds a lot like Dracula. Charming, personable, holds a low opinion of humankind, persistent and thick-skinned, lacking in conscience, fond of showing off, big spender …

Sorokin seems to demonstrate most of these traits, bar one; her addiction to Manhattan high life kept her in New York, when she might have been better served by travel.. Mind you, she took New York for every last penny she could get, and her success in that sophisticated city that never sleeps is what makes her famous. Other people stole more, but they didn't take New York's social scene for such a nasty ride. If her Foundation had ever opened its doors - an 'extremely pretentious private member's club', according to the Guardian's Hadley Freeman - it would have fit right in. New York has thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of plausible grifters like Sorokin. 'I lived in New York for a long time,' says Freeman, 'And that is the kind of … bullshit that you hear from people like that, in that area.' Sorokin wanted to fit in, and that is exactly what she did.

Let's gamify this.

Assume she's an asset in the world of Night's Black Agents. She's a natural chameleon who lives on social media, paying her way on someone else's credit card. She knew that, as a high-flying socialite spending a lot of money, hotel owners and restauranteurs don't want to challenge her. It's bad for business. So she can keep pushing the limit. It helps that she looks the part and keeps overtipping. Statistically she's a Civilian with effective High Society, Flirting, Flattery and Intimidation pools of 1 each, the Intimidation only useful against businesspeople and shop owners. However because she keeps pushing the limit she can be very successful, as a con artist. If there are two Bucharest Rules phrases that exemplify her, it's Build Your Own Network, and Keep Moving Forward.

As a Conspyramid asset, she's a free-roaming grifter looking for a likely target. She wants validation and fame, so she'll be especially dangerous to agents who rely on High Society and interpersonal abilities. She fits into that world. Several Edom dukes, such as Osprey, Pearl and Tyler, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of infiltration, as are some of the Legacies. However playing on Sorokin's MO, her most likely targets are other women; people she can befriend, be a buddy. Then she starts to mooch.

She probably doesn't run whichever Node she's affiliated with. Her handler would have to keep her at arm's length. She's not someone you'd trust with the Seward Serum. However her background in art may give her unusual ability pools, or Network contacts. She's the kind of person who gets by on her friends network, so it's reasonable to say she knows a lot of peculiar people in all lines of work. She probably knows a few low-level thugs, and bodyguards, along with the fashion plates and restaurant owners.

She may fit better into a Mutant City Blues game, which is all about crimes and the criminals who commit them. I haven't seen the 2nd Edition document, so everything I say here is based on my knowledge of the original game.

As a Mutant criminal, she most likely has passive power sets. This isn't someone who throws fire blasts around or sprouts fangs. This is someone who gets what they want through manipulation. Possibly Sexual Chemistry fits, but she really doesn't seem to be the siren type. She's more likely to use Memory Alteration, Possession or similar; some form of mind control or influence. At most she might display Psionic Blast, but even that sounds a little too violent. The one thing she definitely will not have is Nondescript. Her entire grift depends on her being seen, especially with the right people.

However it could be more interesting to have her as an ordinary con artist who everyone thinks is a Mutant, either because that's the way she plays it, or because nobody wants to admit they've been taken by a Normal. Mutants in particular will never, ever, in a million years, willingly admit they were conned by someone who isn't themselves Mutant. That Resist Influence power the mark boasted about is looking pretty thin right about now.

Alternatively she could be a beard, a front for a mind-influencing Mutant who is Nondescript but who seriously loves the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Sorokin and her pals jet off to a luxury holiday in Morocco, and nobody ever notices that an extra face is along for the ride. When Sorokin gets busted, the Nondescript recruits another wannabe socialite. The girl who ends up in jail might swear up and down she has no memory of doing all those things people say she did; what of it? Nobody in prison's guilty. Everyone was railroaded.

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!

The Little Tractor That Couldn't (Esoterrorists, Mutant City Blues)

Sometimes these things write themselves.

Pity the poor farmer whose tractor throws its final wobbly and insists on major repairs, as John Deere may hold that farmer to software ransom. For the full skinny take a look at this article in Vice, but the short version is: as John Deere has installed software on its tractors that can only be repaired at John Deere dealerships, desperate farmers in the US have turned to crackware brewed up by Ukrainian software pirates to keep their tractors free.

And they say there's nothing new under the sun.

I've discussed the potential of unusual hacking and infiltration techniques before. Everything has chipware in it. We are living in Cyberpunk 2020 (except with slightly fewer gun homicides) and we all Love The Computer, yes we do. But how many of you out there realized that tractors were also at the mercy of their manufacturer's chipware?

From John Deere's perspective there's an obvious attraction. Here you have a market that's utterly dependent on your product, but the purchasers insist on carrying out their own repairs rather than hasten to the dealership when there's a problem. Wouldn't life be so much easier, and more lucrative, if they'd just give up their annoying independent ways and become totally reliant on the dealerships?

Meanwhile the purchasers' fears are summed up neatly in the article itself: John Deere could just decide to shut down their tractor remotely and there's not a damn thing they could do about it. It's one thing to have to refer to the EULA when it's an app you bought for $0.99 that went screwy. It's something else again when the product in question costs north of $40,000 and is the only thing standing between you and economic ruin.

In step those nice Ukrainians with their free market dynamic and their oh-so-reasonably priced supplies. Incidentally, perhaps its just me but I had no idea tractors were so complicated. Payload files that program individual parts of the vehicle, allowing the owner to fine-tune the thing like Frankenstein tinkering with the Monster's limbs? Yikes. I in my naiveté figured all you had to do was turn the key, like a slightly more sophisticated Model T Ford.

While I have every sympathy with the farmers in this scenario, it does beg the question: just what might be coming in with that cracked software?

Picture this: some chancer in, oh, let's say Moscow why not, ensures that the crackware coming out of the Ukraine destined for the American Midwest is riddled with custom viruses. Then that same chancer says to Farmer Bob one day, pay me $10,000 in Bitcoin, or your tractor is kaput. Or just decides for a laugh to remote control a dozen tractors and start carving crop circles across Ohio.

Or shuts down the farming industry altogether. After all, once you let someone's hooky software into your industry, it's not just John Deere who can screw with your livelihood.

That's if you're content with ordinary hackers. The Creeper0741 virus I posited for Night's Black Agents could have a field day with this setup. Imagine one gigantic Hive Mind controlling every single tractor in the Midwest. In fact you don't need to do much imagining, since Stephen King's already done the heavy lifting for you.

So what can we do with this, say, from an Esoterrorists or Mutant City Blues perspective?

Well, Esoterrorists is straightforward. A terror cell, possibly with assistance from Ukrainian Esoterrorists, starts using software sourced from the other side of the Membrane to really mess with everyone's day.

The real trick is going to be misdirecting the players. Half of them will, as soon as they get the initial plot hook, suspect that the tractors are the source of the problem. So they are, but it's boring if they guess right away.

So your best bet here is to shoot for something a little more unusual. Say that software was designed to perform a particular magic ritual, but instead brought an Organ Grinder into being - part tractor, part killing machine from the Outer Dark. These things tend to hide in cities, but there are plenty of places across the rural Midwest where something like this could hide out for months, venturing out every so often to claim fresh kills. Often these things are traced by the magic rituals and grimoires used to summon it, but this time it can be tracked via the dodgy forums and black market sites used to disseminate the tainted software.

Or, if your group is comfortable with mature themes, this could be the Snuff Golem of their collective nightmares, perhaps created in collaboration with a farmers-only sex site. 'City folks just don't get it,' claims the site designers. Well, no, they don't - but then, who would? One interesting side note to a creation of this sort is that a tractor-based golem would presumably be less vulnerable to water damage than the standard variety. Not immune, just slightly better protected.

Mutant City Blues is a little different, and hopefully less horrifying.

Oddly enough there are no Powers that directly affect technology, which I can't help but feel is a missed opportunity. However re-writing the Quade Diagram to include them is beyond the scope of this piece.

Judging by the existing background material, it's unlikely that the Heightened Crimes Investigative Unit has a dedicated outpost in the farm belt. I'd have thought it more likely that there's, say, an HCIU representative attached to one of the existing police structures, say the state police or FBI.

What a lonely job that must be; nobody else who shares your duties or unique condition, a ton of paperwork - mostly useless, but it still has to get done - and every time some farmer puts in an insurance claim for dead cows lost to, say, force beams, you've got to rock up with your outdated forensics kit to prove that, no, it really wasn't force beams, so you can take a few zeroes off that claim, Farmer Bob.

Then somebody up and kills you. Wouldn't that just be the icing on the cake.

Ordinarily the police are very proactive about going after cop killers, but the staties and Feebs may not be so quick to get involved when it's the weirdo from the HCIU lying on a slab. So in come the big city boys to play Green Acres for a day, and hopefully avenge their fallen comrade.

Turns out the dead cop was onto something potentially very interesting, because someone seems to have found a way to make the Possession power work on tractors. Or at least so the cop claims in her notes, and it seems pretty clear that she was run over by something that must have been remarkably like a tractor. So who knows? Perhaps the Quade Diagram will have to be rewritten after all.

Possibilities:

1) Actually it was the John  Deere rep, who's been trying to wean the locals off of their Ukrainian tech. He's been using software from the home office to mess with local farmers, and when the HCIU cop caught on he used that same software to make it look as if an illegally modified tractor ran her down. Now he's hoping nobody's a skilled enough computer user to work out who was really controlling the tractor that day.

2) Except no, it was the HCIU cop herself. She was desperate to get out of this dead-end assignment; desperate enough to invent a completely new Power variant, hoping that by doing so she's earn a transfer to somewhere where there's more Starbucks than cows per square mile. She used hooky Ukrainian software to do it, and thought it would add to the realism if she could engineer a near-miss incident with a rogue tractor. Except the miss wasn't nearly near enough, as it turned out.

3) But no again, it was a bunch of bored Mutated kids messing with the HCIU cop for kicks, because she kept interfering in their business. Problem is the joke went one step too far, and now the kids are doing their best imitation of Mizaru, Mikazaru and Mazaru, hoping against hope that nobody will ever trace that dodgy tractor control software back to them.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

McCybercrime (Mutant City Blues, Night's Black Agents)

According to the latest Europol serious crime threat assessment there are over 5,000 new gangs operating in Europe, most of them human traffickers or cybercriminals indulging in ransomware attacks.

The biggest spike is in polycrime groups, or organized crime operations that are involved in more than one criminal activity. However the Europol assessment warns that the greatest challenge threatening law enforcement is the increasing adaptation and deployment of technology.

Document fraud, money laundering and the online trade in illicit goods and services are the three key issues. Document fraud is linked to human trafficking and the increasing migrant problem, while the other two are more traditional criminal activities. While there's no direct correlation with terrorism, terrorist groups often work hand in hand with criminals, either for services or to fund operations.

What makes it all the more serious, the Europol assessment alleges, is that cybercrime is getting to the point where you don't need to be a sophisticated computer user to take advantage of the technology. This is the age of crime-as-a-service; you can buy everything you need online, without having to write a single line of code.

Tony Thompson in his book Gang Land says much the same:

Internet Relay Chat rooms - an untraceable form of instant messaging - are filled with hackers advertising their wares, from keystroke loggers and password cracking programs to stolen credit card numbers and banking details. The more you get into this world, the more amazing it gets. Back in the day, the only way to acquire this kind of detailed knowledge about how to be a successful criminal was to go to prison. Now, for those who know where to look, it's all available online.

Misha Glenny in his work McMafia says:

The era of the malicious virus that chewed up computer screens, destroyed your hard disk or directed you to vile pornographic websites is fast coming to a close. Those attacks were the work of so-called 'ego-hackers.' They were designed to make the computer users' life a misery, as projects that had taken months or years were destroyed for the sake of an adolescent giggle. Now viruses, Trojan horses, worms and other malware go largely unnoticed. The sun has set on the age of the ego-hacker and the dawn is rising on the age of the criminal hacker, or cracker. 

So how can this be gamified?

Games set in the modern day like Night's Black Agents, or even BubbleGumshoe, can make use of crackers and their made-to-order crime packages. In fact it may be even better suited to BubbleGumshoe than most Pelgrane titles, since that setting is all about the solving of crimes.

That said, there's one setting that's even more suited to crime-busting than BubbleGumshoe: Mutant City Blues, a game in which super-powered mutant cops chase down their criminal counterparts. 

Ever since the Sudden Mutation Event, people have been able to fly. Phase through walls. Read minds. Shoot bolts of energy from their fingertips. Walk into dreams.

As members of the elite Heightened Crime Investigation Unit, you and your fellow detectives solve crimes involving the city’s mutant community. When a mutant power is used to kill, you catch the case. When it’s a mutant victim in the chalk outline, you get the call. And when it comes time for a fight, you deploy your own extraordinary abilities to even the odds.

 Mutant City Blues assumes, among other things, that the game takes place ten years from the current date. That allows you, as GM, to take advantage of current day technology and world events without worrying too much about pin-point accuracy.Technology will be recognizably similar to today, but updated, and the same goes for geopolitics, social trends, and other markers.

So if you assume that the inciting event, the Ghost Virus, happens right now, then however Donald Trump leaves office by the time the game starts he will have left office. There will still be a Russia, still be a China, a Europe. Brexit will be well under way, with significant effects for the UK and Europe. There will still be an internet, and probably still be some form of tablet, but perhaps there will be a rival to Apple and Samsung, and so on.

Which means that the age of the cracker will already have passed its zenith by the time the game starts.

What does that suggest? Well, probably that what we now call the darknet, accessed mainly by the techno-literate, is more available to the techno-dim. That setups we consider to be the province of sophisticated criminal networks are now available to those for whom Internet for Dummies is a must-read.

That probably includes a lot of mutants.

So with that in mind:

Cracker Firouz Kamkar, aka Marko in his online persona, has a lucrative sideline. He provides what amounts to the complete e-commerce package for would-be cyber criminals. They sign up, and he gives them a custom site with secure bitcoin or credit card checkout. Many of his clients are drug dealers, but a significant minority are criminally inclined mutants selling their specialized services to the highest bidder.

Except for his mutant clients Marko has a special package: ransomware. At any point Marko can seize control of the user's PC, site, bitcoin accounts, and all electronic communication the user may have made with clients. Marko then makes a very simple request: pay extra. A lot extra. Or I take all this and dump it in the laps of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit.

Marko, being a fourteen-year-old living in his parents' flat, doesn't see a problem with this. Why should he worry about a bunch of mutant losers? They deserve everything they get.

The mutant losers don't see it that way, and now a number of them are on the prowl looking for Marko. When several would-be crackers turn up dead in interesting and inventive ways, the HCIU discover a small crime wave right under their noses. Can they get to Marko before his mutant enemies do?

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Enquiring Minds

I've been reading a lot of Mutant City Blues recently. It's a fun RPG setting; I particularly like the concept of the Quade Diagram, in which various kinds of mutation can be linked to other kinds, creating a chain by which certain powers can be deduced, and weaknesses too, based on the observed powers of the mutant in question. Fun stuff!

If I'm disappointed at all - and I'm not even sure that disappointed is the right word - it's that, for a game in which crimes are solved, relatively little emphasis is placed on the crime scene. I suppose you could argue that this is the difference between, say, an Agatha Christie novel and a CSI scenario. The television series CSI, particularly in its more recent incarnations, sacrifices detail to tell a story, whereas a crime drama in its classic incarnation is all about the detail. The very first Hercule Poirot novel, for example, turns entirely on a point about a document that may, or may not, exist. The reader is able to deduce whether or not it exists and, as a consequence, what happened, next, by paying attention to details, chief among which is the discovery of the crime scene. Christie even goes so far as to draw a map of the house in which the scene takes place, so her readers can follow along and make their own deductions.

CSI follows a completely different path. Television is a visual medium; the viewer isn't supposed to supply intelligent input. Certainly the viewer isn't supposed to work out whodunit. The whole point of a crime story as presented in this light is to entertain, for an hour or so, and then present a result that the viewer finds satisfactory. Or at least that the network finds satisfactory, which is why so many follow the CSI path and so few the Wire. But that's a story for another day.

If you will write, then you must read. Write what you know is the popular credo, but as so few people know the intricacies of murder it follows that, if you are to write crime, you need to read a hell of a lot. All manner of odd, forgotten authors become grist to your mill, which is why I have a copy of Burt Rapp's Homicide Investigation: A Practical Handbook.  I'm not about to pretend that Rapp is an unsung genius. Apart from anything else, he's as dated as hell; that book was written back in the 1980s, when DNA analysis - never mind the computerized databases that are meat and drink to CSI - was very much in its infancy. Which, incidentally, makes books like Rapp's invaluable to anyone writing a story set before DNA and the current television cop; ie. anything set before 1989. Many of us can only imagine what that world was like; Rapp knew. But that's by the way. 

There's a section on canvassing for information that I want to cover here, and Rapp's text is as follows:

Canvassing isn't a casual task to assign to anyone who happens to be available. Canvassing requires dedication, intelligence, motivation, and skill in dealing with people. The officers assigned to canvassing should have a clear idea of the information they should try to elicit. Basic information is as follows:

• Name
• Address
• Telephone number
• Work address and telephone
• was person present during the crime?
• did the person see or hear anything?
• does the person know either the victim or the suspect?
• names of any others at this address
• names of any visitors during the period of the crime
• convenient time for another interview, if necessary
• witness' travel plans, for the foreseeable future 

I've been acting as Keeper in I don't care to guess for how many investigative games, for however long, and I can't recall any player asking any of those questions. Nor, for that matter, can I recall many of them taking notes.

It all seems so simple, when laid out as Rapp has it, in order. If you want to know what happened, then you ask who was there, you ask what they saw or heard, and you ask if there was anyone else on site who might have heard or seen anything. Hardly the stuff of revelation.

Or consider something from a different source:

Similarly, an Edinburgh surgeon in 1880 diagnosed a patient as a recently discharged sergeant from a regiment posted to Barbados; the man was respectful but forgetfully kept his hat on, as in the Army, he was Scottish with an air of authority, and he had elephantiasis, which you get in Barbados but not in the Highlands. Elementary, my dear Joseph Bell (1837-1911).  [The Alarming History of Medicine, Richard Gordon]

Investigation is, above all, the art of paying attention. In RPG terms, it starts in the very first scene, and does not stop until the scenario is over. Players should never take the information as presented entirely for granted; there is always something there to discover. Equally they should never neglect the basics. Who was there? What did they see, or hear? What is present at the scene, and what might account for it being there? Tunnel vision never does anyone any good, and to wed yourself to a theory of the crime without sufficient evidence is to invite disaster. It isn't all about progressing from scene to scene; sometimes it's about making sure you're on the right path, before making that deductive leap that transplants a Scot to the isle of the Bearded Ones. Just one or two questions can prevent a great deal of useless, even counter-productive effort.

But perhaps most importantly, have a clear idea of the information you're trying to get. In many ways, it's like an exam; understand the question, and then attempt to answer it. That way you have a better chance of getting the right answer down on paper ... or at least, having the satisfaction of knowing that you understood, just before the horrific minions of Cthulhu come knocking on your door.