Who Are We Fighting? (Bookhounds of London)

When I wrote last week about the start of a new Ars Magica game, I was reminded that once upon a time I designed a store for Bookhounds of London using Ars Magica as an example. Thus began du Bourg's, a genteel and gently decaying establishment devoted to the sale of incunabula of all kinds.

This time I'd like to talk a little more about adversary design, using du Bourg's as an example.

Du Bourgs, like the covenant in Ars Magica, is a settled, established location. It has a history, institutional memory, roots in the community. Unlike a traveling band of murder hobos, a bookstore can't solve all its problems by sneaking away in the dead of night to begin a new life somewhere else. It has to deal with its enemies as they arise, and will probably have to deal with them more than once.

The big difference between antagonists like these and the band of orcs a bunch of murder hobos meet once, stab to death, and never think about again, is that these are recurring threats. Over the course of a campaign the investigators must expect to deal with these threats, but not necessarily defeat them.

It's useful to divide these antagonists into groups, as follows:

Minor Recurring (Normal)

Major Recurring (Normal)

Minor Recurring (Thematic)

Major Recurring (Thematic)

In any game the Minor players are going to outnumber the Major ones by a factor of at least two or three to one.

Notice I've divided the groups into Normal and Thematic. Every setting is going to differ slightly in its definition of Normal; Swords-and-Sorcery Normal is not the same thing as Victorian Paris Normal. However in broad terms all Normals are alike, just as happy families are all alike.

Consider: every setting, whether it's science fiction, horror, historic, or wildly ahistoric, has a few elements in common. There is some form of Authority - it might be legitimate or illegitimate, but it's there. There will be agents of the Authority who are sent out to enforce its will, collect taxes, and do all the other things that make society function smoothly. There is some form of Anti Authority, whether actively criminal, like the Mafia, or closer to the freedom fighter model. Or, like the Triads, the Anti Authority can be both criminal and freedom fighter at the same time. The Anti Authority will also have its agents, sent out to enforce its will.

The exact nature of these groups depend on the setting. In a post-apocalypse setting where the planet is just recovering from some major catastrophe, like a zombie outbreak, Anti-Authority probably outnumbers Authority. In a feudal setting there will be very fierce competition to set one faction or another up as the Authority. Equally there will be different kinds of Authority within the setting - a religious Authority, say, and a non-religious one.

In every setting there is weather, there are other intelligent creatures, there is disease, there is decay. There is the urbis, there is wilderness. You can probably think of a few yourself without too much effort. The point being all these things can be Minor or Major Recurring antagonists.

The Dragonriders of Pern series posits that a major recurring antagonist is Thread, a microfilament spore that rains down from the sky, effectively making the weather a major recurring antagonist. Alan Hyder's Vampires Overhead destroys the planet with giant vampire bats from space that devour us all, leaving only a few humans alive - and those humans become the recurring antagonists, predating Walking Dead by more than a century. Wyndham's Kraken Wakes turns the oceans of the world into recurring antagonists, and so on.

You can make anything you like a recurring Normal antagonist. They don't all have to be at daggers drawn with the players - they just have to come back again and again, and oppose the players' schemes.

The other type of recurring antagonist is Thematic. This differs from the Normal in that a Thematic antagonist reflects the Theme of the campaign. In Night's Black Agents the Thematic antagonists are the vampires, ghosts, Renfields and other damnable creatures of the night. In Call of Cthulhu the Thematic antagonists are cults, ghouls, Deep Ones and other elements of the Mythos. It's not simply that in a horror game you have horror things - it's that the antagonist fits the core activity of the setting. The Nodes and Mooks that work so well in Nights Black Agents are completely out of place in Cthulhu, just as Cthulhu is out of place in a slasher flick.

So let's go back to du Bourg's, and think about those antagonists.

Normal, Minor:

• That One Weird Customer. Maybe it's the smell, his lack of respect for personal boundaries, or his obsession with a particular genre or author, but it drives the characters nuts. He just won't go away; perhaps he's protected by Mister Bourg, or perhaps he's rather more familiar with the locks and bolts on the doors than he ought to be.
• The Water Pipes. They knock, they leak, they freeze, they burst. Nothing anyone can say to Mister Bourg gets the place re-plumbed; it's a maze of old pipes and patch repairs everywhere you look. Is your section flooded again? Better call the plumber.
• The Rival Book Scout. How does he always get to the latest sale or trove of rare books before you do? Is the man psychic? Whether he is or isn't, he's the reason du Bourg's hasn't had a Windfall by now.

Normal, Major:

• The Rival Store. It's not quite as old as du Bourg's, and hasn't got its storied history. What it does have is staff that know what they're doing, premises that aren't crumbling to bits, and prices that are better than du Bourg's. Some of our oldest customers are being tempted away - and that has got to stop.

Notice what's happening here. None of these antagonists need a gun to threaten the characters. What they do is complicate the players' lives in ways they can't easily anticipate or thwart. That, and they all play into the greater theme of the campaign. I could have had a local criminal group as an antagonist, but the whole point of Bookhounds is sale and retail. It makes more sense if the antagonists reflect that.

On to Thematic, Minor:

• Maher-shalal-hash-baz, the cat. This is a minor Mythos entity that takes the form of a cat. Exactly how that happens is up to the Keeper, but for the purpose of this example I'm going to assume the redoubtable hunter was taken over by Brood of Elihort, and occasionally drops a few spidery white creatures in darker corners of the building. The Brood are building something, and this time it's not a man-homunculus; it's some kind of device, or living machine. What purpose does it serve - and why is it here?
• Dust Things have infested the sole remaining copy of D'Erlette's Ghoules and they want someone to find this long-lost book. They keep trying to possess customers and older staff members in an attempt to get them to reveal the location of the book, but it never works. Their possessed victims blurt out some occult gibberish and collapse, expelling the Dust Things.
• Diana Wisbee, a member of the Fraternity of the Inner Light who keeps trying to persuade the bookshop to let her hold seances and talks on occultism. If the players let her, something goes wrong - perhaps she annoys the Brood, or summons up actual ghosts, or just gets horribly drunk and starts talking nonsense. If the players don't let her, she keeps coming back again and again, trying to get them to change their mind.  

Thematic, Major:

• M. Etienne du Bourg, founder and alchemical experimenter, really does wander down in the basement. This mummified lich still has some interest in the business - that's why he insists on the yearly meeting - but books aren't his primary concern any more. He doesn't mean anyone any harm, but his experiments need supplies and might have unforeseeable consequences. Do the investigators help or hinder his research? What will he do in response? 

Notice I'm not adding stat blocks to any of these, or assigning them abilities. Whether Normal or Thematic, these aren't killers nor are they necessarily in direct opposition to the players. Leaky pipes aren't going to leap out in the dead of night, knife in hand, to stab someone to death. 

No, what they will do is spill water all over that squizz someone's been working on. Or make a particular room uninhabitable. Or make that wooden floor just slippery enough that someone falls. Or … 

See, the things that people remember about their day-to-day lives aren't the number of times they kissed their spouse goodbye in the morning, or smiled at a stranger. No. They remember when the car wouldn't start, or they missed the bus, or a co-worker stabbed them in the back. It's the way we're wired; we remember slights more than we do favors.

The job of an antagonist is to keep rubbing away at that old injury. The One Weird Customer turns up at the least opportune moment. The pipes don't burst on a nice sunny day when there's plenty of time to deal with the problem and a dozen plumbers practically on the doorstep asking for work. No, they burst when the shop's busy as hell, in the depths of winter, when you can't get a plumber for love nor money. Rubbing away, rubbing away - until the moment something breaks.

After all, the whole point of an antagonist is to break things. It's the players' job to fix them.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the Covenant (Ars Magica)

Some friends of mine have been agitating for a new ongoing game, and I offered several options. Only one was fantasy, and that was the one they jumped for. Ars Magica 3rd ed shall be my new RPG home for the next however many number of Seasons.

I loved this game when I was in uni. I know the game's had other editions since, but it's the edition closest to my heart. It's beautifully designed, the artwork's evocative - I mean, just look at that cover for a start - the rules are fairly straightforward, but most importantly there's a flavor of gaming here to suit every palate.

The biggest drawback is that it wants a lot of record keeping - fairly mathsy record keeping at that. If you're not prepared to keep clear notes, heaven help you. In D&D you can often fudge it, but in this if you don't keep track of what you're up to each season, you are asking for trouble.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure: this is troupe-style roleplay set at the tail end of the High Medieval period. The third Crusade has come and gone, and gunpowder hasn't yet burnt down the feudal world. The great plagues and famines have yet to devastate the continent, but it's only a matter of decades rather than centuries before the Black Death claims the lives of millions. Speaking of:

Did I mention how much I love this setting? 

The game presumes magic exists, and achieved its greatest heights during the classical and Roman period, when the Cult of Mercury spread the rituals and, more importantly, scrolls and proto-grimoires, of the wisest Magi far and wide. Your main characters are heirs to that magical tradition, who have become part of the Order of Hermes to further the study of magic.

However this isn't a story about wizards. It's a story about people who band together, forming a covenant or magical community. Everyone in that community is a potential character, from the lowliest Grog to the more powerful Companions to the Wizards in their ivory towers. The idea being that you, as a group, chart the course of that community from its birth in Spring to its eventual Winter, and possibly beyond. This will take years. It may take centuries, and over that period you can expect characters to come and go. The covenant, if all goes well, survives. 

A covenant begins in Spring, bursting with hope and enthusiasm but lacking resources. Not unlike the first time you leave home and go to university, or get your first job, or whatever might happen. Some covenants sputter and die at this point, but those that survive pass on to a glorious Summer, when their power is at its height. Then comes Autumn, when ambitions mellow and things settle into a quiet routine. After that comes Winter, when the rot sets in and power fractures. 

The writers captured this chronology in the Four Seasons books in which a covenant's cycles are charted over the course of four campaign arcs. Not coincidentally named after Shakespearian plays, it starts with Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a starting covenant struggles against the odds. The Tempest cements their rise with a challenge that seems linked to the very origins of the Order. A Winter's Tale plots the fall from Autumn to Winter, while Twelfth Night offers the possibility of redemption through glorious death. 

This Saturday is the first session, when the players design their covenant and create their first characters. They're all experienced gamers but none of them know the system. So what happens next?

Well ...

Here's a few tips for those starting their first game, whatever the system.

1) KEEP CALM. You know this system. Maybe the others have played this before, maybe not. Whatever else happens, you know for a certainty they've never played *your* game. Take a breath, don't lose your cool, be prepared to explain everything at least six times … and keep calm.

2) BRING EVERYTHING. Maybe it's different for you folks, but my guys prefer analog. They don't want it in .pdf; they want the actual thing. If there are six people at your table, yes, they will all want character sheets - but they'll also want a character generation cheat sheet, a spell list, or just something to read while they wait for the slower folks to get their heads straight. The great thing about .pdfs is you can print the bits you need and ignore the rest. Have extra character sheets, extra Virtues and Flaws sections, and some background material people can read.

3) SMILE, FOR PITY'S SAKE. Everyone knows this is meant to be fun, but this is as much about your performance as it is about the game. If you look worried, they get worried. Being a good keeper/DM/whatever is as much about reading the room as it is knowing the rules. Smile. Crack jokes. Be at ease. It'll kill their nerves and keep the session rolling.

4) BE GENTLE. It's their first time, after all. Remember what I said about repeating things six times? Make that twelve. Or however many times it takes for the message to get across.

5) START SIMPLE, GET COMPLEX. I started character generation with Grogs. They're the cannon fodder, the red shirts, the expendables. Yet they use exactly the same character generation system as everyone else, which means they're perfect for getting the players' feet wet. Once they'd done a few Grogs  they could move on to something more complicated. If this was D&D, I'd start at first level. Sure, it's tempting to give everyone levels and magic items so they can wallop dragons, but if this is everyone's very first game, never ever start above first level. To you it's all so simple, but to them it's incredibly intimidating. There's all these new terms, strange dice, a long list of abilities and characteristics to keep track of - and that's before they go anywhere near the dungeon or swing a sword in anger. On that note: no dragons. Goblins, yes. Giant rats, yes. Maybe a wolf if you're feeling daring. Anything capable of causing a full party wipe in one attack round should be nowhere near this adventure. Dragons come later. Complexity comes later.

Right now they've created Grogs and are halfway through Wizards. Next time it's covenant design, and the first small scenario.

So far we have:

Taleh Ex Miscellanea, clever but not spontaneous, a witch of the old school.

Brun de Avilla, a mountain of a man whose scars from past torture prevent him speaking.

An unnamed wizard of Verditius, a cunning vintner and inventive genius.

An unnamed archer (jeez, mate, really?) whose excellent armaments hint at an unsavory past.

Diego, a farmer and animal husbandman, whose drinking lets him down time and again.

An unnamed bear Bjornaer, whose master still pursues him after all this time.

Another cunning archer, Ella, a mercenary who had one brush too many with bad luck.

An unnamed Merinita magus, extremely intelligent and charismatic, a master of arts.

Everyone's having fun. That's the most important thing, after all.

Enjoy!

Playing With Real Toys: The Raketa Graveyard (Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists, Timewatch)

Once upon a time in the former Soviet Union, someone junked the future.

All images for this post taken from Urbanghosts.

The Raketa series of hydrofoil riverboats were based on 1940s era designs, and you can see modernist and deco influences in these sleek rivercraft. Capable of 70km/hr cruising speed and built to carry 60-70 passengers, they were meant to be the river transport of the future. Built from the 1950s through to the 1970s and made available for export, they plied the Volga for many years. A few were sent to China, Cambodia, and Europe, but the vast majority stayed within the USSR. There are some survivors, but not many, and those that are still commercially viable have often been modified with new engines or had their hydrofoils removed.

The ship graveyard in the photograph is part of the closed city of Zayozorsk, Murmansk Oblast. Originally intended as a base for a nuclear submarine fleet, this administrative district, also known as Zayozyorny and Severomorsk-7, can only be accessed by those with the appropriate clearance, much like the satellite launch site Vostochny, discussed previously. Unlike Vostochny, there's little reason to think Zayozorsk has much of a future. A little under 12,000 people live there now, according to the most recent census. Like similar urbanizations of its type the closed city is nominally self-governing and exists as an urban core with an outer layer of more or less rural territory. This decayed shell with its rotting shipyards and disused railway lines is where somebody decided to dump the remains of the Raketa fleet. 

As a game location it has many advantages. It's a closed city, which means the characters will have to sneak in somehow with forged papers (or real ones obtained through devious means), or trespass. Anything could be going on there, from secret scientific experiments to Area-51 style storage for those things the Russian government would prefer to forget about. The people who still live there may know all kinds of things about what happened in Zayozorsk back in the day - or they might not be people at all. Innsmouth on the Volga? The last colony of an alien race? Vampires? 

Thrilling elements:

• A group of dispirited soldiers nominally on patrol wander by. They may not notice much, but tangling with them only alerts the central authorities. 
• Bored locals kick a football around next to one of the abandoned Raketa.
• A sudden clatter comes from an abandoned building next to the ship graveyard. Did part of the roof cave in, or is someone watching?
• Shadows cluster around an abandoned Raketa, and the last glimmer of daylight gleams off its remaining windows.
• A murder of crows perched on a Raketa glare at human trespassers, and will not willingly move. They stare haughtily at any interloper.
• A small group of homeless see the agents and make a run for it. What did they leave behind in their camp?
• For one brief moment it almost seems as though that Raketa is brand new, untouched by time, as though it just launched. Passengers can be seen smiling and chattering among themselves, and the captain sits proudly at the bow. Then the image is gone, but its afterglow lingers in your mind.
• Judging by the markings on that abandoned ship someone's been using this one as a place to store goods. Who was that someone affiliated with - Edom, the Russian mob, someone else? Is there anything left in the cache?  

Then the Scenario Seed:

Keyhole satellite data, elint and humint all suggest that something peculiar's happening at Zayozorsk, and it's centered on the ship graveyard. Russia's government pretends ignorance, but leaks from the Ministry of Internal Affairs suggest it's very keen to track down anyone related to engineer-shipbuilder and father of the ground effect vehicle Rostislav Alexeyev. Those who look into the matter further discover that most of his living relatives mysteriously vanished over the last two years, but two distant relations living in the West survive. 

Those who look closer at Zayozorsk discover that all transport to and from the closed city has been halted, and the embargo is being enforced by armed troops. 

Someone - a Network contact, perhaps - who claims to be in contact with someone inside Zayozorsk reaches out to the characters. This contact says his friend in Zayozorsk is asking for supplies, most of them medical but some scientific. Analysis shows the equipment could be used for all kinds of things, but is most likely intended to help restructure or rebuild a hydrofoil. What possible purpose could that serve?

Timewatch: the Zayozorsk contact is trying to rebuild, not just a hydrofoil, but the forward-facing Soviet Union of her youth. This time traveler is sick and tired of modern Russia, and seeks to remodel her vision of the Soviet Union on modernist principles exemplified by the Raketa. She feels this era, when Soviet technological advances were at their height and the world trembled at the feet of the USSR (at least as she remembers it), is the world she wants to live in. To that end she's been collecting everything to do with the Raketa and the man who designed them. She's built a kind of gestalt-brain out of Rostislav's relations, and using the equipment she has on hand she's rebuilt a test case Raketa to take her away from the present and into an alternate reality. The people who live in Zayozorsk are broadly on her side; they don't relish being ignored by Putin's Russia and want to return to the good old days when they had meaningful jobs and Zayozorsk had a future. The only thing holding Putin back is the thought that the rebels might have nukes; nobody has a clear idea what was still stored at that old sub base. It's Timewatch's job to ensure this gestalt alternate-reality machine never launches.

Esoterrorists: A cell has been busily at work trying to create a quasi-religion based on Soviet era futurist technology. People have been sneaking into Zayozorsk from all over, at first to see this grand new design and later to help build it. The town has been reinvigorated, and not necessarily in a good way - people are disappearing, perhaps having crossed over into the new reality, perhaps not. The cell hopes that all this futurist worship will weaken the Membrane sufficiently to let them breach reality's walls and bring their own version of the future through. The Russians will move in at any moment to cleanse the town, but if they put a foot wrong they might puncture the Membrane more efficiently than the Esoterrorists themselves. Putin's champing at the bit, but Ordo sympathizers within Russia's establishment would rather Ordo Veritatis went in first; that way if something does go badly wrong, it's not their fault.  

Night's Black Agents: A breakaway Conspiracy node has been working on its own project. This Node thinks Soviet-era futurism is the key to an important Conspiracy goal, but the higher levels of the Conspiracy disagree and have, until now, quashed all investigation along these lines. The Node thinks it knows better than the higher-ups, and has funded a low-level Facility to carry out test work. All this is very much off-book, and the Node hoped nobody would ever find out about it before the Node was ready to unveil its triumph. In a shocking turn of events that surprises nobody except those in charge of the Node, someone did find out. They leaked. Now all kinds of people are taking an interest, from Putin's Russia to the agents, and possibly other government-sponsored anti-vampire programs. The Node wants to clean up the Facility before anyone finds it, but the scientist in charge just won't quit despite all the red warning lights and alarms. It's a race against time to get any useful data from the project before wetworks teams move in.  

Enjoy!

You Must Pay The Penalty (RPG All)

Sometimes characters fail, and that's okay.

What's not okay is the binary choice system we, as Keepers/Directors or what-have-you, put ourselves in by insisting that failure = extreme penalty, usually health damage or catastrophic plot damage.

I've often thought this is a holdover from the earliest RPGs, where assuming THACO is X and the character rolls something less than X, the character misses. There isn't a middle ground. Hit, or miss, with the possibility of critical miss or critical hit.

The recent Pelgrane One-2-One systems make different assumptions. It's very difficult to out-and-out fail a roll. The character usually has 2D6 for any test, where a result of 3 or less is a Setback, 8 or less is a Hold and above 8 is an Advance. So the character's only likely to get a Setback around 8% of the time. Whereas the character's very likely either to succeed (perhaps with some complications) or win extra benefits, so long as the die roll is unmodified.

This is in no small part because having the character fail in a One-2-One in any scene other than the climactic ones is boring. Lovecraft didn't end Innsmouth at the part where Roger Olmstead makes a break for it out his hotel window, slips, and falls to his doom. Neither should the Keeper end a story before the character at least understands what's going on and what's at stake.

It's different in a combat-heavy system, where the plot can be irrelevant and the only real criteria for success is how many levels a character gets. In any game where the plot takes second or third place to contests, whether or not a character out-and-out fails a contest is extremely important, because those contests are the only means the character has of influencing the shape of the game in any significant way.

In a game where plot is more important than contests, the character has other ways of changing the shape of the game. The character can create plot, or solve the existing plot, and while this can involve contests it doesn't have to. The character who gets blackmail information on an important NPC and uses that information to force the NPC to do a certain thing, is just as successful as the character who draws her sword and wins a contest, forcing the NPC to do a certain thing. Both these courses of action assume that having the NPC do a thing is as important, if not more so, than getting levels or gathering treasure. However one method involved little or no contests, whereas the other was nothing but contest.

In a plot-focused game there has to be some kind of penalty for those moments when the character fails a test. The question is, what kind of penalty should it be?

I handle failure by ramping up the consequences but keeping the chain going, and I announce the consequences in advance. So:

Player: Okay, now's my chance. I tie together several blankets and, using them as an impromptu rope, escape out of my hospital room to the ground below.

Director: You can do that, but be warned: if you fail this roll, the nurse will come in the room while you're escaping and scream, alerting everyone.

Player: Fine. [rolls, fails]

Director: You reached the ground but now everyone knows what happened and where you are. Security is on its way.

Now, I could have said that failure means the character slips, falls, and injures herself. However it's usually more interesting to impose a story consequence in a story-driven game. Health loss is only an interesting consequence if this is the kind of game where a lot of combat happens, because in those systems health is more important than any other stat. In story-driven games health is rarely the most important stat.

In the above example failure didn't injure the character but it did impose story consequences, thus continuing the chain of events. If the test succeeded the character could probably escape unnoticed. Now the character has to find a solution to the story problem, which is that security will recapture the character unless the player does something to prevent it.

Moreover I warned the player ahead of time. That's important for two reasons: first, it raises tension. The player knows even before the die is cast that there's a significant penalty for failure. Second, by establishing consequences ahead of time the Keeper avoids seeming wishy-washy. Failure has to be failure, not a reason to create more tests until the character finally passes one. Oh, you failed that test? Um. Well, we can have another test … and another … and you're really bad at this, but let's have another test …

The swashbuckling game 7th Sea tried something similar in its death mechanic, by insisting that player characters never died outright in a fight. Instead they became Helpless, and could only be Killed by a deliberate act. This encouraged players to do reckless things in combat - which is the point of a swashbuckling game, after all - secure in the knowledge that, while there might be consequences, they would not necessarily be character-ending ones. Moreover if there was a chance your character could die, that possibility would be flagged by the obvious presence of a Villain capable of taking that deliberate act.

Ultimately this was because 7th Sea valued story over combat, but still wanted a fair amount of combat. The setting was very Douglas Fairbanks, after all, and you can't have that kind of story without at least one sabre duel in some dramatic setting.

Bear in mind there probably weren't any safety nets or guide ropes on set. That's all Fairbanks.

This should be ringing a chord with, say, Night's Black Agents Directors. After all, those games also involve significant combat or chase scenes with potentially fatal consequences for those involved. At the same time the Director probably doesn't want to kill the characters midway through the scenario.

But if you can't or don't want to kill them, there has to be something else you can do. In any game there's usually something, but the Director has to be creative.

For example:

At the end of a Thrilling Chase scene across the rooftops of Paris, the agent fails a roll and the enemy gets away. Rather than have the agent who failed the roll tumble to the ground, the Director rules that the agent made the leap but didn't quite get to the rooftop. Instead they landed on the balcony below, taking 1D6 damage. In addition, the Director rules that for the remainder of this scene and the next scene the agent has the Hurt condition, and takes penalties to physical action contests, to reflect sprains, bruises and possibly broken glass injuries sustained during the fall. 

If the agent was trying to get away instead, the Director rules that the agent tumbles into an occupied apartment and the enemy does not follow, not wanting to get caught by the police. Or maybe there's a Bane there, if the pursuer is a Vampire. The agent suffers the same damage and Hurt condition as above, and also gains 1 extra Heat. The agent gained 1 Heat anyway just for being in a chase; now the total is 2. Also, the agent now has to deal with the situation the agent tumbled into - whatever it may be. 

In both examples there is a penalty and it's a serious penalty, but it does not kill the character or end the session prematurely.

The point to bear in mind is this: in any system, no matter the setting or mechanics, there is always an option that does not involve character death. In Night's Black Agents a character can increase Heat, lose Stability, or suffer penalties to future die rolls to name just three potential consequences. A character can also be Captured, or bitten by a vampire, or lose important equipment or evidence. Say an agent obtains an important Block or Bane only to drop it in the Seine. What happens next?

There is always the possibility of failure, and when a character fails that character must pay the penalty. However it's up to you, as the Daffy of this scenario, as to what that penalty should be.

Enjoy!

Money Heist - Flashbacks (Night's Black Agents)

I've been on a Spanish kick recently after watching the brilliant series Ministry of Time. One of the shows I've been watching is a heist series I recommend to anyone interested in Night's Black Agents: Money Heist, aka La Casa de Papel.

La Casa tells the story of a gang of clever and sophisticated thieves who engineer a takeover of the Royal Mint of Spain, planning to print millions upon millions of Euro and walk out scot free after a 12 day siege. It's gorgeously shot and intricately plotted, with slick twists and turns to astound the viewer. I'm on season 1 episode 10 at time of writing; every episode I've watched these characters pull off moments of sheer genius, none of which I'm going to share with you because it would be a shame to spoil.

This is a must-watch for Night's Black Agents players and directors. Not just for its clever ideas, but because it demonstrates effective use of investigative and general abilities in ways that you haven't thought of. You can go through an episode and say for each moment in a scene, Disguise, Infiltration, Flirting, Cop Talk, Bureaucracy, High Society - and on and on. Dust gamers should take particular note; this is as Dusty as an eight mile stretch of bad road.

It's also a Lewton's Bus master class, except without the supernatural element. The number of times I've watched this thing spike the tension, SPIKE the tension, SPIKE THE TENSION and then release … and you, the viewer, know it could easily have gone a different way, but here we are now.

However I do want to talk about a mechanic that Money Heist uses at least once per episode: the Flashback.

It works like this: a problem or situation arises unexpectedly. The viewer can't see a way out, or a way forward. Then there is a switch to a previous moment, almost always kicked off by narration from Tokyo, the audience viewpoint character and one of the most significant members of the heist crew. The events that take place in that flashback show how or why the present situation isn't what the viewer thought; that what looked like a crisis is an opportunity, or what seemed victory is defeat.

Night's Black Agents often suggests using flashbacks in-game, but doesn't go much further than 'narrate a brief flashback sequence.' Money Heist goes one further, and I think it can be co-opted into NBA using the Achievements mechanic in Double Tap.

Double Tap proposes a simple mechanic for General Ability refreshes in the middle of a scene. Engineer an Achievement moment - say, by running through a working kitchen during a chase or shootout scene, thus winning the Chef de Partie achievement - and you get a 3 point refresh of whichever General Ability seems most appropriate. The point being that the agent has to create the moment, has to find that kitchen and run through it. If there's no reasonable way of creating the moment, say if it's well after closing time and no kitchens are open, then the achievement cannot be won.

I propose something like this:

La Casa de Papel: Invoke and play through a flashback moment that has direct relevance to the situation you are currently in. This may involve other agents, or opposition forces. Gain a 3-point refresh, and pay for that refresh by gaining 2 points Heat, or by losing 2 points Stability, or by imposing a story problem on another agent that the other agent has to solve. Whichever payment method is used, it must flow directly from the events of the flashback - so, eg, the Heat gain comes from something that happened in the flashback.

In Money Heist a flashback always raises the stakes in some way. It's often used to, in game terms, pay for a Preparedness refresh so the characters can accomplish some cool thing that the viewer didn't think the characters would pull off. However there are always story consequences, and La Casa is very much a Dust game, with all the Trust and lack of same that implies. There are inevitably serious consequences every time Tokyo calls for a flashback, and the only question is who suffers. It might be Berlin, or the Professor, Helsinki, Nairobi, one of the hostages, one of the cops, but someone gets burnt.

That's why each time you call for this achievement, you have to pay for it with some kind of penalty. Heat affects the entire team. Stability losses affect the agent in a way that make future tests more difficult. Imposing a story problem harms a team member, whose contributions may be vital to future success or failure.

Say one of the team suffers from an addiction and is hiding it from the group. The story problem might threaten to reveal that addiction, or to remove the substance the addicted agent needs, or lets the opposition know the agent is addicted to [whatever] which in turn allows them to manipulate the addicted agent. Or something else, but whatever it is the story complication ought to be serious. It can't be something the targeted agent can overcome easily. It might even require them to spend pool points of their own - Infiltration, Disguise, Athletics, something else - to engineer a solution. Which means it works great in a Dust game, but it would still work whether your game's Dusty or not.

For that reason this works best as an Achievement. Thrilling Narration can be used by anyone at any time; two agents with the Shooting cherry can both use narration to refresh points. However Achievements can be gained once and once only, so there's a definite benefit to invoking La Casa before anyone else does. Sure it screws everyone else, but at least you're okay - you got your refresh, and now there's no risk someone's going to screw you by calling for their own La Casa and imposing a story penalty on you. Of course, if they can think of a different way to screw you ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Child Spies (Night's Black Agents)

This will be a quick one as Sunday has flown past.

It's based in part on this Guardian article about the police and intelligence services - presumably MI5 though the article dances around that bit - using children as assets in the war on crime and terror. Brief synopsis: a House of Lords committee expressed alarm at the increasing use of children, some under the age of 16, as spies.

The Report on which the article is based can be found here.

'This Order proposes to increase the period for which a person under 18 years can be used as a CHIS [juvenile covert intelligence source] from one month to four months. While the Government state that the rationale for the change is that the one month authorization for CHIS increases pressure on the CHIS and their handlers to get results swiftly in order to justify renewal of the authorization, the predominant tone … was about the administrative convenience of the authorities concerned … The original [report] did not give any context on how such sources would be used or the numbers involved … It gave no indication of what checks might be made on the welfare of the young person not only during the period of surveillance but also in the longer term … We are concerned that enabling a young person to participate in covert activity associated with serious crime for an extended period of time may increase the risks to their physical and mental welfare …'

Unpleasant stuff.

In the Dracula Dossier there's one obvious connection: the Feral Child Vampire (p191). 'Created by Lucy during her brief tenure as 'The Bloofer Lady,' this child vampire hasn't aged since 1894 ...'

Operation FOOTBALL

A joint task force between MI5 and the London Metropolitan Police, Operation Football is supposed to be an investigation of juvenile gangs linked to larger organized groups dealing in heroin, with possible links to terrorist organizations. Several members of youth gang Horror Road have been targeted as part of Football, and the thinking is that flipping these gang members will lead to bigger fish. MI5 is particularly interested in rumors that Horror Road may be linked to a larger group involved in terror acts or the planning of same. One gang member, street name Mayhem, seems to be the primary link, but Football hasn't had much luck with Mayhem so far.

All of which is giving Edom kittens, because Football hasn't found a child informant; it's found the 1894 feral child, and the larger group involved in terror acts is Dracula's Conspiracy. The problem is Edom can't just warn the Football operatives off; it's gone too far for that. Too many people know. There's even talk an MP might raise the issue in the House, in support of (or to counter, whichever) the House of Lords' efforts to bring some order to the current Regulations governing the use of child spies.

Option One: Containment. This assumes the agents are working with or for Edom. Their task is to bring Mayhem in as discreetly as possible, preferably without involving or alerting Football's operatives in any way. Ideally they capture the SBA and provide a suitable corpse substitute - knife crime's a real problem, so sad. Of course Mayhem isn't likely to cooperate - the feral hasn't had this much fun in years.

Option Two: Node Surfing. This assumes the agents are freelancers or at least not connected to Edom. Their job is to follow Mayhem up the chain to the Node the feral's working with. Of course they'll have to do that under the noses both of the Football team and also Edom, which is doing its best to contain the situation without exposing its own operations. Naturally this isn't going anywhere pleasant - the feral might be a very small cog in the larger machine, but the Conspiracy elements it's contacted are bigger fish by far.

Option Three: Bad Day At Work. This option assumes the agents are part of Football and unaware of the larger conspiracy. This is a way to start a campaign, possibly even a Solo Op once the ruleset gets out of playtest. The Football team thinks its about to score a coup, but first it has to justify extending its use of its child operative. While it's doing that, someone drops an explosive bundle of information in Football's lap - its star informant isn't a child, it's been alive for over a hundred years and there are photos, documents or other paperwork to prove it. Who is Mayhem? What is Mayhem?

Enjoy!

Have Fun Storming the Castle (RPG All)

In fantasy and in other genres the castle is something armies attack. Occasionally a band of plucky heroes sneak in before the army arrives, but as a general rule if it has crenellations and a porter its purpose in life is to be besieged and preferably beaten in some great battle.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A castle has two jobs: to exert authority, and survive. To exert authority it needs to have a minimum compliment of troops and a significant compliment of administrators. To survive it needs more castles and a bit of luck.

When William the Conqueror swept England after the great battles of 1066 one of his first priorities was to ensure motte and bailey castles went up as quickly as the Normans could build them, wherever they could build them. There wasn't a central planning bureau picking out exactly where things should be placed; put walls up, put archers on those walls, and send out the tax collectors, was the sum of the Conqueror's plan.

When Rome sent its soldiers out into the world and beat seven bells out of whoever it might be this week, its armies built fortresses or castrum as quickly as possible. Some permanent, some temporary, but all with the same purpose: plant the standard and provide a headquarters for the administrators. Possibly also a marketplace to do business with the locals, if circumstances warranted, but that wasn't its main purpose. Its reach extended further than its walls; it controlled a vast swathe of territory.

Look from culture to culture, from Sengoku Japan to the American frontier or the Aztec empire, and you'll find the same. First there is the period of conquest, where simple forts are flung up as quickly as possible. Not all of them will be built in good locations, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they fulfil their first purpose: to exert authority. In time the castles that no longer matter or which were built in poor locations will be abandoned. Sometimes this means they'll be destroyed so someone else can't use them, and at other times or in less organized societies old forts will be left to decay. Meanwhile the better designed or situated castles will be improved upon. Each surviving castle will carry out its intended purpose: to provide a base of operations for administrators to collect taxes and organize civil operations, say a court of justice.

However survival depends not on defenses but on your neighbors, and that's why castles need more castles.

Back in the day if you were standing at the top of a decent-sized tower and looked in any direction, odds were you'd see another castle off in the distance. It might only be a speck on the horizon, but it's there. The reason why it's there is very simple: an attacker might get one, but not all.

If you're attempting to invade a country your job is to get from the entry point to the main target as quickly as possible. This is even more true in situations where your army has to move on foot through difficult terrain, as has been the case for most of human history. There are only so many months in the year. Some are rainy, some are frozen, some are too hot. Your army might only have three or four months before it has to dig in and wait out the weather. That assumes you have a cohesive, professional army that is paid and trained to fight. For much of history that simply wasn't so. Generals and Kings had to make do with what they could scrape together, but that meant conscripting farmers and other people whose absence was keenly felt at home. Farmers have a nasty habit of deserting when the harvest and planting seasons come. Sailors don't want to work in dangerous conditions for little pay when they could earn much more in the merchant marine.

Even in the present it's ruinously expensive to keep a professional army in the field for longer than a few months. Remember a while back when I talked about the Muscle in Night's Black Agents? I quoted an article posted in the Guardian which said child soldiers fresh from conflicts in Africa were being hired by mercenary companies like Aegis - formerly Sandline - to do duty in Iraq.

"You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England," [James] Ellery, a former brigadier in the British Army [and former director of Aegis], told the Guardian. "But it can't be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I'm afraid all we can afford now is Africans."

The point being that if your job is to get to and conquer the main target, anything that delays this advance is a threat to your economy as well as your campaign. If there are twenty castles in your way then there are twenty threats, and there are only so many options open to you.

You can attack. Congratulations, you just lost the war. A siege takes weeks, perhaps months, and may require specialized equipment you don't have. One siege is doable, maybe, if you're lucky. Twenty is not an option. Even if you capture one or two by quick movement and surprise attack, the others will be waiting for you.

You can ignore them. Congratulations, you just lost the war. Each of those castles has a defensive force and now that defensive force is free to attack your supply lines, your stragglers, and anything else it can get its grubby little hands on.

You can devote a small portion of your force to keep each castle's defenders under siege while moving your main force to the primary objective. Congratulations, you just made things much, much harder for yourself and may have lost the war. Your army is only so large. There's only so much it can do, and if you send one force off here and another off there and a third to God alone knows where, by the time you get to the thing you actually want to attack you may not have enough troops to knock it over.

This is why some of the most successful military escapades in medieval history were hit-and-run raids. The Hundred Years War and Omar's relentless attacks on Marlo Stansfield have this in common: it's not about territory, it's about making the other side bleed. Send the Black Prince and a band of thugs on Chevauchee, pillage everything in sight and run away before the enemy can get an army together. Do that often enough and you put the enemy on the defensive, forcing them to meet you on terms of your choosing.

This is also why when castles fall it typically isn't to an attacking enemy. When castles fall, it's because someone betrayed them. It might be that the defenders reached an accommodation with the attackers before the fight even began, or it might be that one or two people inside the castle let the enemy in. There's many a ballad and ghost story about a foolish lover who let her paramour into the castle, only to be stabbed and left in the ruins as the besiegers take the fortress.

All that said, what does this mean to your RPG campaign?

It means that when you design a castle in your game you need to think about its jobs. It has to exert authority and survive.  Authority doesn't mean knights and heroes, it means soldiers and administrators. Someone has to collect the taxes, administer justice, and do all the pesky things that need doing if the country's going to run smoothly.

It's great if the guy in charge is a hero, but it's not about the heroism nor is it about the noble lineage. When William divided up England he didn't give out manors to the most blue-blooded Normans he could find - he was William the Bastard, after all. He gave out manors to successful soldiers, and if, as time went on, those soldiers proved unworthy or died childless the manor would be handed out to someone else. Manors change hands all the time. That's what makes them so useful; the more manors you have in your gift, the more loyalty you can purchase from would-be manor holders.

In a fantasy setting, or in any setting where mundane power - swords, guns - can be outclassed by magical or supernatural power, this does not change the castle's first job. Its first job is still to exert authority. However it does change the castle's second job, because survival in a magical world is tricky business.

The point behind having a lot of castles is that it eats up an attacker's time. An army can't afford to lose even a day, never mind several weeks or months. However if an army has a dragon on its side then a castle might fall in a day. In fact, a dragon might fly ahead of an army and take castles by surprise, forcing their immediate capitulation. An undead army might march more quickly than a living one - no need to worry about fatigue - and doesn't care whether it's winter or summer. The list goes on.

So castles will need some form of defense against the threats that face it, and that may change the way castles are designed. When the threat was that someone might mine under the square corner of a wall to cause it to collapse, castle builders started using round towers which were much less vulnerable to that technique. When cannons made tall walls obsolete forts lowered their profile, eschewing tall walls for long, low palisades with interlocking fields of fire, to keep the enemy from getting too close.

If the castle designers know that dragons are going to be a threat, they'll start putting in anti-dragon measures. If they know undead armies are a thing, they'll start putting out anti-undead measures. Exactly what those are will depend on the enemies' characteristics and power set.

Say this is the typical kind of undead we're talking about, that can be defeated by holy power. In that case every castle has a picket line of shrines, each with its own minor holy relic - something blessed by a high-ranking official, a saint's finger-bone, what-have-you. The point being to keep the undead from getting too close, as well as providing a kind of early warning system. There will be at least one person at the castle whose sensitivity to the ebbs and flows of magic warns them when one of those shrines is interfered with. Equally it will be someone's job to make sure all those shrines are well maintained.

Moreover it will be someone else's job to steal the holy relics, because every castle needs them and there aren't enough to go around. There will be a secondary market in relics, many fake, because when demand is high and supply low, or restricted, black markets spring up like mushrooms. So it will be someone else's job to detect fakes, and prosecute the people stealing holy relics. Or just kill them. Whichever works.

This applies across the board. Castles aren't just for fantasy systems after all; every setting, from science fiction to gritty noir, has its equivalent.

Say we weren't talking about castles. Say we were talking about Facilities in a modern day game. Does anything change?

Not really. Whether a Facility is dedicated to Manufacture, Collection, Distribution, or Analysis, it still has those two basic functions. It has to exert authority and it has to survive. Exactly how it goes about those two functions will change depending on the setting.

Let's say this is an extra-legal facility in a setting like Night's Black Agents. Lets say that its job is to distribute McGuffins, and that it has to do that job within a developed, moderately policed environment. Anywhere in Europe, really; somewhere there's plenty of communication links, transport links, free movement, and enough cops to keep the peace. Not where movement is restricted or there's a significant number of secret police or armed forces checking everyone's papers.

So here is your castle: it's one distribution facility. It has to exert authority, and it has to survive. It has to do those things in an environment that is innately hostile: if the cops knew it existed, they'd shut it down, because it's an extra-legal facility.

So how does it exert authority and survive?

Castles exert authority by providing a base for administrators and tax collectors. The same applies here. The collection authority is a base for, say, vampire Conspiracy types. Since it's a distribution facility it probably doesn't have troops and bosses; it has trucks, drivers, and a bunch of goons. As D'Angelo points out in the Wire, the drug stash never moves without soldiers to protect it.

The exact nature of that authority will depend on the nature of the facility. A low-level, unimportant facility probably doesn't have powerful soldiers, and so on. But powerful or not, someone at that facility is in charge of making sure everything works smoothly, that the McGuffins get to where they need to go when they need to get there, and that the police or whoever is nominally in charge doesn't interfere with the facility's operation. Those are the administrators.

It also has to survive. Castles survive because there are lots of castles. The more of them there are, the less likely it is that any attacker will be able to take them all on. Sure, one or two may fall, but there are always other castles. The sheer number of them may be enough to persuade enemies not to attack at all.

Facilities can use the same trick. There's never just one distribution facility. There are dozens, hundreds. The larger the organization, or Conspiracy, the more likely it is that it will have many facilities at its disposal, some more important than others. If one gets destroyed, move operations to another.

There can be alternate means of survival depending on the nature of the threat, just as the best defense against an undead army isn't necessarily a large number of castles. If the threat comes from a bunch of unaligned burnt spies, then one way to ensure survival is to turn the Heat up as soon as the agents show their faces. Squeal loudly and often; let the cops know that crazy gun-toting madmen are on the prowl. Or, if the facility can't afford to get the authorities involved, tell other criminals. The agents aren't the only one with the Yojimbo option. "You know that shipment you were supposed to get, but which was intercepted by the cops? Yeah, it was these guys." For 'intercepted by the cops' read 'we deliberately didn't sent it' or 'we set it up to look like an ambush.' Whichever best suits the situation.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!