hollowpoint. bad people killing bad people for bad reasons.
B. Murray C.W. Marshall
VSCA Publishing Vancouver, BC, Canada Toronto, ON, Canada VSCA Publishing authorizes any owner of this digital book to print and bind the document for their own use. This includes the right to print and bind the book in whole or in part for personal use or for the use of the other players at your table. So if you’re a clerk at some place where someone might want to do this, and have a policy about printing material in copyright, please be advised that the owners of the copyright do not consider you making three or four copies at any one time an infringement.
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Copyright ©2011 by VSCA Publishing All rights reserved. Digital release ISBN 978-0-9811710-7-4 Revision 1.1 VSCA Publishing http://www.vsca.ca Contents
1. Introduction • 7 1.1. The Game • 8 1.2. The Setting • 11 1.3. Examples from fiction • 13 1.4. Thanks • 14 1.5. Reference material • 15 2. Agency • 17 2.1. The Charge • 18 2.2. The Enemy • 19 2.3. The Era • 20 3. Characters • 21 3.1. Step one: Rank • 21 3.2. Step two: Skills • 22 3.3. Step three: Name • 24 3.4. Step four: Traits • 25 3.4.1. Traits by Q and A • 27 3.4.2. Traits On the Fly • 28 3.4.3. Company Traits • 28 3.5. Step five: Complications • 30 3.6. Experience • 32 4. Conflict • 35 4.1. Dice Pools • 37 4.2. The Fight • 40 4.2.1. Skill • 41 4.2.2. Teamwork • 42 4.2.3. Fan Mail • 43 4.2.4. Go to the dice • 43 4.2.5. Effects • 46 4.2.6. Moving on • 47 4.2.7. Wash • 48 4.2.8. Special Abilities • 48 4.3. The Catch • 49 4.4. Skill Checks • 50 4.5. Narration • 50 4.6. Ending a Conflict • 52 4.7. Tactics • 54 4.8. Sample Conflict • 55 4.9. Conflict, with a Catch • 59 5. Mission • 65 5.1. Objectives • 65 5.2. Exploding into action • 67 5.3. Mission Building • 68 5.4. Sample Adventures • 71 5.4.1. Arena • 71 5.4.2. Magnificent • 74 5.4.3. Callisto • 77 5.5. Pacing • 81 Appendix: Stories • 83 A.1. Enzo’s Ambition • 83 A.2. Behold A New Creation • 90
Field Guide • 95 Personal Weapons • 96 Grenades • 97 Shotguns • 98 Cons • 100 The Fight • 101 Knives • 102 Pistols • 103 Ammunition • 104 The Sub-machinegun • 106 First Aid • 107 Index • 109 The windshield of your Cadillac explodes and Joel hits the gas. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do, but you trust Joel because he has that special kind of aggression that makes everything work out even when it’s a bad, bad idea. This is no exception. The heavy sedan fishtails as the right rear bursts and the tick tick tick of small caliber ammunition flicking through the dash, your seat, and your suit is just another countdown to zero. As the car stops, Joel ducks down with expert timing and you bring your custom .40 Smith & Wessons to bear throughOne the driver’s side window at your assailants—half a dozen punks with foreign sub- machineguns taking cover behind the dumpsters. Those dumpsters will come in handy in a bit. You grin. Joel laughs. It gets loud.
1. Introduction
Hollowpoint is a role-playing game about hyper-competent, unpleasant, violent people doing what they do best. They work in a team, even if that isn’t their natural inclination. The game at once tries to capture the essence of modern-day competence mythology and bind these super-individuals into a functioning unit. This is the essential strain: these are people who like to be the best, and working together is stressful. Cooperation makes them less effective as individuals. Each knows his or her plan is the right one. Disclaimer: This is a game that deals with torture, execution, terrorism, and other illegal and immoral activities. It is a form of make believe that some people will find offensive or unpleasant. But it’s just a game: it’s safe and no one gets hurt as long as everything stays at the table. Do not do these things in real life, please. Play games instead. 1.1. THE GAME So, this is an RPG, a role-playing game. If you aren’t already comfortable with terms like “NPC”, “ref” (or “referee”) and “GM”, the player/character distinction, and what we mean by dice or an abbreviation like 4d6, then this text may seem a bit arcane. The target audience for Hollowpoint is a group of established role-players who are interested in exploring a new system, that focuses on violence and storytelling. We will, however, pause for a moment on one concept that might be new, and that’s the table. When we talk about the table, we mean everyone sitting down where the game is taking place, regardless of their experience, regardless of who’s the ref, regardless of whose place it is. We’re giving authority to the group that trumps that of the ref or of any individual player. The table is the final arbiter of what goes on, and it is assumed that the table wants to have fun. You’ve come together to enjoy yourselves. Maybe you’ve just had a pizza, or you have snacks and drinks. The gaming experience is collaborative storytelling, and everyone is there for a good time. Hollowpoint needs at least three people at the table to play: one to ref, and two players. It can handle five or six without needing any further modifications. Hollowpoint uses a dice pool system, so everyone will want to have a whole mess of six-sided dice. We like to color-code them so each player has his own, but that’s not needed. You’ll also want a bowl of some kind in the middle of the table to keep the teamwork dice. Players might roll anywhere from three dice to as many as ten. The ref needs twice that. The math isn’t transparent, and the system doesn’t always reward a more-is-better approach. Players offer narration: they relate what their character is doing, how they are doing it and what is happening. The world and everybody that the players encounter are run by 8 the ref, who also provides narration. Everyone at the table is working together to tell a story, but this isn’t a story just about some characters: they come and go, and players will make replacements on the fly. The story ends up being about a group of bad people doing bad things, and the reasons they do them. Life and death are only parts of that. The story offered by the players is at times constrained by the game mechanics, and particularly by dice rolls—once dice hit the table, players have to explain what the dice mean, seeing a story emerge from the numbers, and using this to create more story. Each session begins with a mission. The players narrate their characters addressing objectives, completing the mission and dealing with any fallout. And this is a rough world. Players shouldn’t become too attached to their characters. You should feel free to provide glorious over-the-top deaths for your character if the dice roll demands it. These are fictional characters, and they only have as much life as the players give them. Embrace that: an awesome few hours of ultraviolent role-play from invested players working together to tell an unforgettable story is better than making your way through the next few 30’x30’ rooms in a dungeon somewhere. Hollowpoint makes a great pick-up game and can be played in a single session. An hour’s prep for the ref is all that’s required in advance. Just write the mission, make characters, and go. Each session is a series of scenes which may or may not have a conflict. If dice are rolled, that’s a conflict and players can lose and characters can die. It may be that the mission has several stages, and that each stage gets resolved in a conflict scene. It may be that the mission is resolved in the first conflict, and everything else is fallout. The emphasis is on teamwork, on group dynamics and not on guy-versus-guy action. There’s a bank robbery scene in Michael Mann’s movie Heat (1995): the crew has robbed a bank and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt others, but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money. 9 Now in most guy-versus-guy gaming, this would be a really And so, Hollowpoint isn’t about a series of guy-versus-guy hard scene to model, because the system will focus on which incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice. The player aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire is focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target—a effects: notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). But all that is story, and it comes from the players. The richness of this • First, I (the player) have to plan how most effectively to scene—and all of its energy—would be missed by focusing on kill police officers because what the system primarily lets who shot whom. The chief issue resolving this scene is how me do with my assault rifle is kill people. I am not enjoying afraid everyone is, and how willing they are to do harm. The that in this context. ability to hit a target accurately is a tertiary factor at best. • Second, I (the character) am not explicitly interested in So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, is about killing police officers. I am interested in escaping with the the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an money and don’t care if I kill police officers. But the system action against an opposing force with a common objective. only models me defeating police officers with my rifle. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An • Finally I (both player and character) have sophisticated, assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which staged objectives that involve violence against a large an effective killing blow can be struck while still allowing opposing force with full knowledge that I cannot just kill the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. all of them. It’s a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men The police are a surrounding force and the robbers’ objective (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or is to create a weak point in their line, penetrate it, defend otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a their egress, and escape. People are going to get killed, but the reason). action is not about killing people. You don’t create a weak point in a defensive line by killing everyone—you create it by making a zone where no one is willing to oppose you. One solution 1.2. THE SETTING is to kill them all, but, since the objective is breaking out, you There are many settings that will work but they all need a few don’t actually care about the body count. And pros know it’s shared touchstones. not an efficient step in the plan. The Agency — a team of agents works for some organization, That’s what we want. You advance constantly and aggressively but their interaction with that organization is minimal: they on the exit and when the line folds, you exit, secure transport, get a mission, and then they go execute the mission. They and depart. The bank robbers are using several important tools get no help from the agency and they don’t need any. They in this process: they are making people feel too afraid to be may not even know who they work for and, if that’s true, effective by shooting the shit out of them. Terror is the tool. they probably don’t care. The cheques always clear and They are identifying and neutralizing core sources of resistance that’s the bottom line. If the agency provides equipment and (vehicles, commanders). Killing is the tool. They are leveraging information, that’s all part of the player’s interaction with her the fact that they do not care about innocent bystanders and character—it’s not in the referee’s interest to play the agency as they know that the police do, giving the robbers vastly more an NPC. 10free mobility and fields of fire. Again, Terror. And so, Hollowpoint isn’t about a series of guy-versus-guy incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target—a notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). But all that is story, and it comes from the players. The richness of this scene—and all of its energy—would be missed by focusing on who shot whom. The chief issue resolving this scene is how afraid everyone is, and how willing they are to do harm. The ability to hit a target accurately is a tertiary factor at best. So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, is about the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an action against an opposing force with a common objective. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which an effective killing blow can be struck while still allowing the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. It’s a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a reason).
1.2. THE SETTING There are many settings that will work but they all need a few shared touchstones. The Agency — a team of agents works for some organization, but their interaction with that organization is minimal: they get a mission, and then they go execute the mission. They get no help from the agency and they don’t need any. They may not even know who they work for and, if that’s true, they probably don’t care. The cheques always clear and that’s the bottom line. If the agency provides equipment and information, that’s all part of the player’s interaction with her character—it’s not in the referee’s interest to play the agency as an NPC. 11 The Mission — the team has a mission. It might be specific Agents are so far beyond everyone else that they hardly notice or vague, but it’s handed down to them from the top. It might us. So the opposition for agents are either other agents—their specify techniques or leave everything to the team. But before equals or superiors—or whole organizations. There are no anything kicks off, the team gets a statement about what they “mook” rules: the world is filled with mooks, and an agent can need to do. It is part of the premise that the players will engage take them without needing to break a sweat or roll dice. with and address the assigned mission, and not go looking for a Unless something goes horribly wrong, agents are above the dungeon to explore. The mission is why we’re here. law. Agents do not have trouble with the police. If the police This can be a nice place for handouts from the referee—sitting are a problem it’s because someone much more powerful than down to the table and handing out the evening’s mission as a the police are using cops as pawns to make life hard on the one-page, coffee-stained formal command to action, complete agents. If detained, an agent knows the number to call and with company logo, can set the tone as well as provide a tool whatever is said at the other end of the line is always enough to for players to take notes and refresh their sense of purpose. Pull get an agent released with an apology. A bullet from an agent is out a city map if that will help, or an architectural drawing of not just untraceable; it stops investigations. the target’s apartment. Scenes are never about shopping, counting ammunition, While they are given a mission, how they do this is up to getting a passport, or renting a car any more than we need them. If they think burning down the Chicago City Hall gets scenes about them going to the bathroom: time’s too them ahead, then that’s the way it goes down. The only time important to worry about everyday needs. If an agent shows agents get any guff about their choices is when a new agent up to the scene and describes her arrival in a brand new has to come in to help them fix a bad situation. And that only Mercedes, that’s fine: she has a Mercedes. How’d she get it? happens because another agent has been taken out of the Who cares? Unless she makes a point of narrating how it was picture. Buildings can be replaced; agents are expensive. obtained, it’s just a fact. Move on. Agents — agents dress well and like nice things. They drive powerful automobiles, wear matching dark suits, use state- of-the-art firepower, and take everything in stride. They drink 1.3. EXAMPLES FROM FICTION tequila straight, smoke and never get cancer, wear sunglasses at In Azzarello and Risso’s comic series, 100 Bullets, the night, and walk among the sheep with impunity. They are the Minutemen are the epitome of the agents in Hollowpoint. They ultimate in bad-ass cool. work for a shadowy organization whose sole purpose is to keep another criminal organization in check by wielding extreme Agents kill as part of their job and do not hesitate over their and unflinching violence. Ian Fleming’s James Bond usually victims. They barely notice innocent bystanders. Agents are works alone, but if he had to work with a team, this would be bad people and they move through town like heavy weather. his team. The agency Bond works for is more prominent in the Agents are good at what they do. Skills are ranked from zero fiction than would be played here, but if Bond’s player wants to through five. Most people live their lives with all skills at zero. narrate where he got his laser watch, that’s all cool. The same If you are really good at one of these bad things (you’re a Navy is true of Jason Bourne, whose missions are directed against SEAL or a paid killer), you might have a one or two in a skill. the agency that produced him. If there’s an action movie or But don’t think you are in the same league as an agent. a comic you like, and it involves some agent going rogue or 12 being called a ronin, it could probably be played in Hollowpoint. Agents are so far beyond everyone else that they hardly notice us. So the opposition for agents are either other agents—their equals or superiors—or whole organizations. There are no “mook” rules: the world is filled with mooks, and an agent can take them without needing to break a sweat or roll dice. Unless something goes horribly wrong, agents are above the law. Agents do not have trouble with the police. If the police are a problem it’s because someone much more powerful than the police are using cops as pawns to make life hard on the agents. If detained, an agent knows the number to call and whatever is said at the other end of the line is always enough to get an agent released with an apology. A bullet from an agent is not just untraceable; it stops investigations. Scenes are never about shopping, counting ammunition, getting a passport, or renting a car any more than we need scenes about them going to the bathroom: time’s too important to worry about everyday needs. If an agent shows up to the scene and describes her arrival in a brand new Mercedes, that’s fine: she has a Mercedes. How’d she get it? Who cares? Unless she makes a point of narrating how it was obtained, it’s just a fact. Move on.
1.3. EXAMPLES FROM FICTION In Azzarello and Risso’s comic series, 100 Bullets, the Minutemen are the epitome of the agents in Hollowpoint. They work for a shadowy organization whose sole purpose is to keep another criminal organization in check by wielding extreme and unflinching violence. Ian Fleming’s James Bond usually works alone, but if he had to work with a team, this would be his team. The agency Bond works for is more prominent in the fiction than would be played here, but if Bond’s player wants to narrate where he got his laser watch, that’s all cool. The same is true of Jason Bourne, whose missions are directed against the agency that produced him. If there’s an action movie or a comic you like, and it involves some agent going rogue or being called a ronin, it could probably be played in Hollowpoint13. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Tarrantino’s Kill Bill Other playtesters include the undetectable Jonah Marshall, worked as a team of agents before things went wrong. And, for the unforgiving Joel Schabas, the unstoppable Dylan Le, ultra-competence in noir grit, it’s hard to beat Frank Miller’s Sin the unflinching Gerald Ling, and Paul Jones and his group at City. Plymouth. You can also use Hollowpoint for more supernatural or even sf We also need to thank someone who prefers to be known stories. Think of Highlander: they walk among us, fighting their only as “A Terrible Idea”, as he granted the VSCA some very own battles. They have done so since the dawn of time. Some powerful and valuable software that has made producing this of them barely even register our presence. When they do, we game a lot easier (and a lot more fun) than it would have been don’t last long. Maybe they remember us. Or Terminator: a otherwise. Finally, we need to thank everyone who plays technologically advanced super-killer from the future has to be Diaspora, because if that game hadn’t been the success it is, stopped, and the heroes must use anything they can to destroy we probably wouldn’t have tried to make any more. So that’s it, whatever the cost. The slightly supernatural tone of Mark almost 3000 people we need to thank. Millar’s comic Wanted plays into the extreme competence of Thank you. Hollowpoint characters, and generally this is exactly the gang of assassins you want. You could even amp up the stories where extreme competence 1.5. REFERENCE MATERIAL isn’t on display: there is a significant cock-up factor inPulp The following books might also provide useful material for Fiction that might not fit, insofar as the characters’ competence adding detail and realism to a Hollowpoint game. We’re not is mostly in their heads, but it still maintains a coolness professional trauma veterans, toxicologists, or homicide that can’t be denied, and there is no question that it’s about detectives, but it always helps to know a little more. bad people. Ocean’s 11 are a little too goody-two-shoes, but Danny Ocean’s gang is still a great model for agents. Imagine Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to if they also shot up the place when things went south. Kill in War and Society, Second Edition (Back Bay Books, 2009). Probably anything with the Rat Pack in it could be adapted to Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon, The Book of Poisons (Writers Hollowpoint. Digest Books, 2007). Vernon J. Geberth, Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, 1.4. THANKS Procedures, and Forensic Techniques, Fourth Edition (CRC, 2006). A lot of people need to be thanked for getting Hollowpoint to William Barry Gault, “Some Remarks on Slaughter,” American this stage, and they are all bad, bad men. Certainly the gang Journal of Psychiatry 128.4 (1971) 450-454. at our table—J B Bell, Tim Dyke, and Byron Kerr. Also some special thanks are in order to Jake Reisenbichler, who really tore into an early playtest draft. If there are still problems, there’s one person who’s not at fault, and that’s Jake. J B also took time at the end of the process to read through and help us edit—we’re really grateful for that. 14 Other playtesters include the undetectable Jonah Marshall, the unforgiving Joel Schabas, the unstoppable Dylan Le, the unflinching Gerald Ling, and Paul Jones and his group at Plymouth. We also need to thank someone who prefers to be known only as “A Terrible Idea”, as he granted the VSCA some very powerful and valuable software that has made producing this game a lot easier (and a lot more fun) than it would have been otherwise. Finally, we need to thank everyone who plays Diaspora, because if that game hadn’t been the success it is, we probably wouldn’t have tried to make any more. So that’s almost 3000 people we need to thank. Thank you.
1.5. REFERENCE MATERIAL The following books might also provide useful material for adding detail and realism to a Hollowpoint game. We’re not professional trauma veterans, toxicologists, or homicide detectives, but it always helps to know a little more. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Second Edition (Back Bay Books, 2009). Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon, The Book of Poisons (Writers Digest Books, 2007). Vernon J. Geberth, Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques, Fourth Edition (CRC, 2006). William Barry Gault, “Some Remarks on Slaughter,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128.4 (1971) 450-454. 15 16 All his biometrics matched the details in the system. He answered the questions right, and even had four years of blog posts and party pics on the Internet: a fully falsified life on the web. But the fucker was bent, and I knew it even if no one else did. He was traveling under one of my names, the one on my Canadian passport. He was being set up to be found by me. He was indistinguishable to everyone else – even his retinas matched. Someone, though, wants me to notice. Well, the manTwo with my name now has my attention.
2. Agency
The first step in a game of Hollowpoint is creating the agency that all player characters work for. This agency becomes a defining element of the setting itself, and so designing the agency requires a few steps, building from the ground up: 1. What kind of agency is providing the missions? What does it protect? This choice is the Charge. 2. What does the agency destroy? This choice is the Enemy. 3. When is the game set? Is it our real world or some close variation or are we going further afield? This choice isthe Era. This information should be sufficient for players to create characters (see ”3. Characters” on page 21) and for the ref to provide missions (see “5. Mission” on page 65). Make sure the players are on board with everything: this is a table decision. The agency is going to come from the players; the ref should stick to playing the opposition. The agency can 2.2. THE ENEMY be created mutually if you intend to run a campaign—all players can come up with a novel situation in which to be bad people. The Enemy is what threatens That’s cool. For a pickup game, you probably want the referee the Charge of the agency. to create this as pre-game preparation. It’s short work, really, Note that (as in 100 Bullets) especially if you aim to emulate some existing fiction. this could easily include the Charge itself. Organized crime, All agents are members of this agency. Their devotion to it is enemy governments, thieves, unexamined—when a player character becomes disloyal, that vandals, aliens, time travellers, character goes out of play by moving on (see “4.2.6. Moving SPECTRE, whatever. Having a on” on page 47). This focuses the players on teamwork consistent organized opposition and on mission objectives without any essential controversy will keep a thread of common that might steal focus from the action. This does not prevent purpose throughout multiple interesting twists—a player bringing a new character in after sessions despite changes in moving on gets to change objectives, and that new objective characters. The players embody might oppose the agency! If this happens, a new agency has their organization through their formed with the player characters as its membership. characters. If the opposition is effectively a polar opposite to the agency, then it should also 2.1. THE CHARGE be possible to “flip” a session and The Charge is a one-liner that captures the purpose of the (say) play COBRA against G.I. agency and therefore the core goal of every agent. What does Joe. the agency do? For example, “Maintain the balance of power Examples. between mega-corporations”, “Protect the integrity of the James Bond: Super villains and world’s art museums”, “Defend America from Communists”. global terrorist organizations Whatever the agency protects, this is what every mission is with international political about. The Charge can even be the integrity of the agency aspirations. itself, though this can limit opportunities for mission variety. 100 Bullets: Inter-family strife in Agents complete missions that accomplish the charge. the crime syndicate. Examples. G.I. Joe: Super villains and organizations intent on evil for James Bond: Protect England from those who would harm no clear purpose other than that her. they can. 100 Bullets: Perpetuate the balance of power between the criminal families in the Trust. G.I. Joe: Defend freedom, democracy, and free-market 18capitalism. Fight COBRA! 2.2. THE ENEMY The Enemy is what threatens the Charge of the agency. Note that (as in 100 Bullets) this could easily include the Charge itself. Organized crime, enemy governments, thieves, vandals, aliens, time travellers, SPECTRE, whatever. Having a consistent organized opposition will keep a thread of common purpose throughout multiple sessions despite changes in characters. The players embody their organization through their characters. If the opposition is effectively a polar opposite to the agency, then it should also be possible to “flip” a session and (say) play COBRA against G.I. Joe. Examples. James Bond: Super villains and global terrorist organizations with international political aspirations. 100 Bullets: Inter-family strife in the crime syndicate. G.I. Joe: Super villains and organizations intent on evil for no clear purpose other than that they can. 19 2.3. THE ERA The Era describes in a brief phrase in what time period the game takes place. By default the setting is a modern world that is very close to our own, any time in the last sixty years or so. But there is nothing essential to the game that requires that this be so—this could as easily be a medieval or futuristic society. Any time and place where there is a structured society outside of which one may operate, this game should work. Examples. James Bond: 1950s era—everyone smokes, dresses well, and the cold war colours everything. 100 Bullets: Late 90s to present day—a more “street” feel than Bond, a cheap black suit favoured over a tux, and crime is the international intrigue. G.I. Joe: Near future—no one smokes, even the tough guys are clean. Military colour rather than civilian. As a default, you can always use the Agency: this should 3. Characters empower a gang of thugs that most people can get a handle on right away. The Agency has the Charge: “Keep the balance of power between the East and West Coast criminal families Characters are made at the start of the session and should take stable.” The Agency has the Enemy: “Any threat, internal or no more than 30 minutes, even with joking, talking, and other external, to the cartel.” The Agency that the game implies by non-game communication. There are five steps in character default has the Era: “Modern, gritty and realistic.” generation, during which the ref will distribute the Mission to the players. Depending on how traits are generated, the Mission is distributed before, after, or during step 4.
3.1. STEP ONE: RANK Characters start the game with the rank of “Agent”. Later a player might create a character with the rank of “Operative” or “Handler”. It may be that the story will use other terms for these (see the alternative setting “A.2. Behold A New Creation” on page 90) but regardless the players start with no choice— all characters begin at entry-level. They are agents. 20 The game changed radically soon after Sandalwood entered the business. It was back in ’81, when Reagan signed EO 12333. That gave Sandalwood his first government contract. No need to go private any more; he can work strictly for the pros. When the government wants poison (anything from neurotoxins to hallucinogens to isotopes), they come to Sandalwood. I’ve gone to him myself, back when I was still with the Firm. And Sandalwood has a house in the Hamptons and a nice 401K waiting for him anytime he wants it. But he didn’t retire and now I have this designer virusThree in Johannesburg that’s obviously his work. I guess he’s retiring now.
3. Characters
Characters are made at the start of the session and should take no more than 30 minutes, even with joking, talking, and other non-game communication. There are five steps in character generation, during which the ref will distribute the Mission to the players. Depending on how traits are generated, the Mission is distributed before, after, or during step 4.
3.1. STEP ONE: RANK Characters start the game with the rank of “Agent”. Later a player might create a character with the rank of “Operative” or “Handler”. It may be that the story will use other terms for these (see the alternative setting “A.2. Behold A New Creation” on page 90) but regardless the players start with no choice— all characters begin at entry-level. They are agents. Each rank also has a special ability: Agent — an agent can take one for the team. Any time the referee announces a hit on a character (whether knocking out a die or causing an effect), any agent may volunteer to take the hit instead on her dice (if she has sets to knock out) or on her character. Operative — the operative is here to teach. When anyone calls for help and is denied (even if denied by the operative), the operative can take two dice from the teamwork pool. Handler — the handler is in charge. When an operative or agent is getting squeamish about helping others, the Handler forces the issue. Don’t worry about these abilities for now; they are explained in “4.2.8. Special Abilities” on page 48. For the moment, just know that they exist.
3.2. STEP TWO: SKILLS All characters have six skills. Players rank them, assigning a value from zero (no special skill, about the competence of an average citizen) to five (zen masters might work for decades to achieve this level of competence, if zen masters were in this line of work). The ref presents a skill list to the players. It will have at least six skill names on it, nouns or verbs that represent what the characters will be able to do during the mission. Depending on the mission, the ref, and the table, there might be eight or so possibilities to allow a certain type of story to be told. Each skill is very broadly defined, and over the course of play serves as a hook onto which players will to hang narrative. Skills measure things that an agent does to other people. An agent may be a Ph.D. in Chemistry or a concert pianist, but that isn’t a skill in Hollowpoint. 22 Players go through the skill for the session and assign their numbers, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, and they’re done. The basic six skills are these: • KILL — killing people by shooting them, stabbing them, or driving them over with a tank. • TAKE — stealing things that do not belong to you. • TERROR — causing terror and making people afraid of you by acting very badly indeed. • CON — tricking people into giving you what you want. • DIG — finding out things that others do not want you to know, or otherwise investigating or getting information. • COOL — being just that awesome. This is what you roll to lead a team, to smile in the face of danger, or disarm a bomb on pure instinct and grit. Being cool allows player descriptions to shine, and provides an objective measure of awesomeness if ever one is needed. If more than six skills are being used, all unclaimed skills will be at level zero. There shouldn’t be too many skills in the game, though, since effects do not stack, and too many skills in play allow too many hits to be soaked up by the players. Expand the list to taste. For example, making two or three of the following available to players changes the sorts of stories they might produce, but does not change the game mechanics: • SEDUCE — In a game focusing on social interactions, this could be a complement to CON. While CON allows you to get what you want from someone, SEDUCE makes them want to give it to you. In a game that focuses on the ethics of ultra-violence, TEMPT (leading people to make a bad moral choice) might be a better option than SEDUCE. • WATC H — While it is somewhat passive, WATCH can be introduced as a complement to DIG. DIG is the investigative skill, gathering information in advance of a conflict. WATCH is the ability to observe within the scene: call out help to shooters, coordinate communications,23 etc. • HURT — Not enough violence in the game for you? Add Players may want to add more than this, to write a paragraph HURT to the skill set, to model the inflicting of pain. about what the character looks like, or what his background is. HURT might be substituted for TERROR, when long- That’s fine, but it’s not necessary. Ideally, these are all details term psychological damage isn’t as interesting as seeing that would emerge over play as the players provide narration. suffering. Because sometimes you need a special skill just None of the skills necessarily implies anything about character to blow out someone’s kneecaps. appearance, either. Someone with a high KILL score might be seven feet tall with fists the size of steamer trunks, or she • BOSS — The pressure of narrating COOL can be might be a hundred pounds with throwing stars and a katana. overwhelming for players. BOSS is a nice replacement It’s all in the story. that is for telling people to do things, and having them get done. It gives you a knowledge of tactics and strategy, the confidence of a true leader, and a Stentorian voice to ensure you are heard over gunfire. 3.4. STEP FOUR: TRAITS Characters begin the game with five traits. This number might A supernatural game will need different skills: in a game of increase if the character survives a session and goes on to play high-powered wizards hunting Nazi super-soldiers, skills such in another one, but that doesn’t happen a lot. The purpose as ILLUSION and NECROMANCY could model different of traits is twofold: traits offer a mechanical advantage in schools of magic. These are just CON and TERROR with a a conflict, and they provide a hook on which to hang player- mystical paint job. generated narrative. Traits are also a means for declarations by the player for what he or she wants to happen in the game. 3.3. STEP THREE: NAME The mechanical advantage is straightforward: in a conflict a player may burn one or more of their character’s traits and If your character doesn’t have a name by now, give him one. immediately roll two more dice for each trait expended. Don’t worry about this too much: it’s not a real name anyway. The player puts an X beside that trait and it is of no further Example: At the end of step 3, this is what we might have: mechanical benefit for the session. For any given roll, any Amber Sparks, Agent number of traits may be brought to bear. KILL 5 Amber deals death; she’s a pro. Where the trait is an object, burning it usually represents COOL 4 Amber is the woman you’ll think about in the ear- the physical loss of the object. The narration includes the ly morning half-light as you awaken, every morn- incidental loss of an object important to the character. A ing for the rest of your life. distinguishing feature of the character has been stripped away. CON 3 What Amber wants, Amber (usually) gets. Example: Yuri has a trait, a ceramic hula girl that he picked up TAKE 2 Remember when the Louvre lost those paintings that one time in Utah. She sits in his windowsill, a focus for last summer? That was Amber. him as he prepares to take a KILL shot. The player burns the trait to roll an extra two dice. It then helps shape the story. DIG 1 Sure, Amber can hack, and find out what she needs to know about you. TERROR 0 Amber has no interest in causing fear. That’s a waste of her time. Only assholes deal in fear. 24 Players may want to add more than this, to write a paragraph about what the character looks like, or what his background is. That’s fine, but it’s not necessary. Ideally, these are all details that would emerge over play as the players provide narration. None of the skills necessarily implies anything about character appearance, either. Someone with a high KILL score might be seven feet tall with fists the size of steamer trunks, or she might be a hundred pounds with throwing stars and a katana. It’s all in the story.
3.4. STEP FOUR: TRAITS Characters begin the game with five traits. This number might increase if the character survives a session and goes on to play in another one, but that doesn’t happen a lot. The purpose of traits is twofold: traits offer a mechanical advantage in a conflict, and they provide a hook on which to hang player- generated narrative. Traits are also a means for declarations by the player for what he or she wants to happen in the game. The mechanical advantage is straightforward: in a conflict a player may burn one or more of their character’s traits and immediately roll two more dice for each trait expended. The player puts an X beside that trait and it is of no further mechanical benefit for the session. For any given roll, any number of traits may be brought to bear. Where the trait is an object, burning it usually represents the physical loss of the object. The narration includes the incidental loss of an object important to the character. A distinguishing feature of the character has been stripped away. Example: Yuri has a trait, a ceramic hula girl that he picked up that one time in Utah. She sits in his windowsill, a focus for him as he prepares to take a KILL shot. The player burns the trait to roll an extra two dice. It then helps shape the story. 25 “Yuri loved his G3. It made a great sniper rifle and when things went wrong you could flip the switch and go to full auto. At 600 rounds a minute, a full box disappears in two seconds, and makes a lot of chaos. So when the shot on Anducci went all wrong and his pal Joseph took the money, Yuri flipped the switch and emptied the magazine. The G3 jumped and bucked and the bar below exploded in glass and splinters and screams. As the G3 danced, it knocked the Hula Girl off the sill to shatter on the pavement below. When the glass and dust settled and the sirens began, Yuri left Joey and Anducci dead on the ground, lying in a pool of blood and bourbon.” Where the trait is a permanent souvenir, like a memory or a scar, burning it represents telling the story (whether to another character or to the table as an audience in a flashback). It is gone forever because, frankly, no one wants to hear the scar story twice. Example: Tor has a trait, “a gunshot wound over my heart”. But this time, he’s brought a knife to a gunfight, and the dice on his TERROR roll just didn’t cut it. He’s been shot, but the player wants to minimize damage. Tor does, too. So the gunshot wound is burned, and that story gets told. “Hah, the bullet entered right beside the old scar, right below the clavicle. Sure I’m leaking, but like the last time, it’s the guy shooting that’s in trouble. I laugh and bleed, just like last time, and I aim and throw my blade, like the last time. I’ve survived this wound before. He hasn’t.” As players describe their actions, they use the traits and integrate them into the story being told. Table consensus will determine the relevance of what’s being offered, but there aren’t many traits available, and it’s easier to be generous. Traits may be generated in one of three ways, as determined by the ref and the nature of the story. Players should all use the same mechanism for determining traits. With the first method, “Traits by Q and A”, traits are chosen before the mission is assigned. With the second, “Traits On the Fly”, traits are chosen after the mission is assigned, during play. Finally, with “Company Traits”, traits are chosen both before (gimmicks) and after (gadgets and sidekicks) the mission is 26assigned. 3.4.1. Traits by Q and A Initial traits are the answers to the following questions (or questions like them), replacing the words in quotes: 1. You wear a black suit over a clean white shirt and a skinny black tie. No hat and well groomed. Nothing to make you stand out, except “this”. 2. You don’t have a lot of scruples, but you would “never do this”. 3. That one time in Utah you took a souvenir; it was “this”. 4. This is a hard job, but you love it because “you get to do this”. 5. You’re a pro and you know you’re a pro because you always “do this”. Other trait-generating questions could be made to reflect the specific features or tone of the table’s game. The narrative link between traits and the mechanical effect can be fairly loose: these are components of the character’s cool, and come into effect in unexpected ways. Example: the player for Amber Sparks answers these questions, and writes down the resulting five traits: 1. steel toed boots. 2. never hurt a pet. 3. an emerald pendant. 4. I like surprises. 5. remember the details.
The mission is then assigned. Replenishment: When traits by Q&A get burned they are replaced at the beginning of the next session, usually with something completely new. Every character begins with five traits. 27 3.4.2. Traits On the Fly Sometimes a character’s past is a mystery even to the players themselves. Nothing is defined in advance. Everyone still has 5 traits, and they get defined and used in play, with players providing elaborate back-story as traits are needed. If you want two dice, you tell the table a story. When players decide to burn a trait, they write it then and there. They provide some background story that is relevant to the current situation, describe it in four or five words, write it down on their character sheet, and then put a big X beside it. Though no traits are chosen in this step, the mission is assigned before proceeding to step 5. Replenishment: Traits on the fly are never replaced or restored, but at the beginning of a new session players get three new trait slots, which can put them above their initial five.
3.4.3. Company Traits With this method, there are three types of traits available (gimmicks, gadgets, and sidekicks), and players may choose any combination of the three types to make up their five traits. Gimmicks remain constant from one mission to the next; gadgets and sidekicks can be changed between missions. As characters survive into new sessions, more Gimmicks become available. See “3.6. Experience” on page 32. Gimmicks. There are some abilities that are not skills. Skill rolls are always opposed—what you do when you roll the dice, you do against someone else. Nevertheless, in the realm of human activity, sometimes someone doesn’t have to lose. These are abilities that one might want and not every hyper- competent killer should be able to do them equally: Driving Languages Survival Gambling Demolitions Medical Stealth Water vehicle 28Repair Wilderness Now of course everyone has a driver’s license and can drive a vehicle competently. Choosing “Driving” as a gimmick, though, gives the player a bonus that demands a driving story. Gimmicks don’t burn, but are only usable once per session. This doesn’t mean you forget your gimmick, but it can’t be used again this session. Each member of the A-Team had one gimmick: Drive, Gamble, Repair, and Smoke a Cool Cigar. You use your gimmick to make someone hurt more. It might be why you were brought on to this mission. It might just be what makes you special. Your gimmick makes it personal. Gadgets. Agents can be assigned specific pieces of equipment that pertain to the mission at hand. This can function as a “Q Branch” for players: once the mission is handed out, players may assign any remaining traits as equipment. You want a giant crane with a wrecking ball that you can bring in on your assassination attempt? Write it down, and then when you burn it, you can take two dice. It might be a box of explosive bullets, a gun that shoots backwards, a laser watch, a portable nuclear device, or anything else that the player imagines might be useful and suits the table’s tone. Using gadgets in your game requires some planning, and is spelling out the mechanic/narrative links much more clearly before play. The mechanic is the same, but this refines and defines the traits to tie them closer to the narrative. In play, a gadget can be kept, gifted to another agent, or traded for another agent’s gadget. The player defines what this gadget is and where it came from, but generally it is an object with some obvious function special to the work that agents do. Sidekicks. Players may also invest in sidekicks, whose mechanical function is exactly the same as if they were gadgets. A sidekick might be a Sniper in the Hills, a Hot Nuclear Physicist in a Tank Top, an Insider at the Casino, a Double Agent, or simply Backup–whatever the story demands. They have a single mechanical use until they are discarded like yesterday’s newspaper. Sidekicks too can be selected by players after the mission briefing.29 Example: Jack is using Method 3, and she wants her character to be all James-Bond-y. She chooses three gimmicks up front: Drive (so that whatever vehicle is around, whether it’s a tank or a hydrofoil or a space shuttle, she can use it to hurt someone), Gamble (which she’ll save for a CON or a COOL roll), and Leisure Sports (so she can kill people equally effectively on the slopes with her ski poles or underwater with a harpoon gun). She also chooses one gadget and one sidekick, which gives her five traits. Once she receives the mission objectives, she chooses the remaining two: a Portable Satellite Uplink for her gadget, and Pierre, a Parisian taxi driver and Beat poet, as a sidekick. The mission is then assigned. Replenishment: Company traits refresh themselves at the start of a new session. Their type does not change but the identities of gadgets and sidekicks can change between sessions (and usually d0).
3.5. STEP FIVE: COMPLICATIONS Finally, each player may choose to create a complication. A complication makes this mission personal in a way unknown to the other characters. It is not something mentioned in the mission statement but is created by the player. It is a personal complication—usually a conflict of interest. It should be big and interesting and relevant and bad. Complications are things like “this chick we need to assassinate is my girlfriend” or “I stole that stash and already spent it on blow”. Write it down and show it to the ref. The ref might veto it if it doesn’t work for the story, but generally she should want to make it happen. No one else needs to know, but they can—players are not characters and they are allowed to know things characters don’t. If there is a high degree of trust and confidence at your table, complications can be kept secret from the referee, so that she too can be surprised by the big reveal. Choose a complication either when the mission is given or 30when a new character enters the game. Having a complication is optional, but if done right it is something that will make the mission especially difficult or unpleasant for the character. It’s also a pre-requisite for victory. Yeah, winning isn’t normally an achievable goal in RPGs, and it’s not that important here, either, but your awesomeness does increase if your character is taken out with a complication. Example: Tor and his team are given a mission, to spy on Margaret Rhys-Davies to determine if she has betrayed the Agency. Tor’s player writes down a complication: “Tor has been screwing around with Margaret for months now. Her husband doesn’t know. Tor would like to keep it a secret from everyone. He’d be hesitant about killing Margaret. Not her husband, though.” You’re done: Amber Sparks, Agent. KILL 5 COOL 4 CON 3 TAKE 2 DIG 1 TERROR 0
Traits: 1. steel toed boots. 2. never hurt a pet. 3. an emerald pendant. 4. I like surprises. 5. remember the details.
Complication: Years ago, Margaret interrupted Amber’s wedding and ran off with her husband-to-be, Sir Lionel Rhys-Davies. Amber’s still angry. Character sheets don’t need to be complicated, and all the information should fit on a 3x5 card or a single piece of paper. Feel free to draw a picture if you like. 31 3.6. EXPERIENCE Sometimes characters survive a session. Hollowpoint asks players to adopt a particular perspective on their characters: that the story is ultimately more important than the survival of the character. This requires a certain view of the player/ character relationship, and it often means that games last a short time—a session or two, rather than a campaign. Life is cheap for agents, and that includes their own. Nonetheless, there should be some reward for the player who gets through a session. Reward isn’t necessarily the right word, of course: the game does not encourage strong engagement between player and character. Players are rewarded with promotion if a character moves on, and with that comes the opportunity to add more dice to the teamwork pool. If a team does proceed to a second mission, characters can persist from one session to the next. That means that at the beginning of the next session, there will be a combination of experienced characters (ones that have seen play) and inexperienced characters (since it is probable at least one character will have moved on at the end of the mission). New characters are always made from scratch: five traits, rank agents, made the same way as anyone else. Experienced characters can carry over, however: 1. Damage is healed. All primary and secondary effects from injuries are removed. 2. Traits are replenished. Depending on the method used for determining traits at character generation, how the traits replenish will vary as described in “3.4. Step four: Traits” on page 25. New traits might also derive from damage taken in a previous session: for example, a character built with “Traits by Q and A” who was Bleeding out in the session but who did not move on might choose as a new trait My insides are all messed up or Metal plate in my skull. 32 3. Any character that survives an entire session—was there at the beginning and never moved on—receives an additional Trait (a sixth in the second session, and conceivably a seventh or an eighth; though getting that far suggests some aspect of the game system is not being pushed). The player may choose anything she likes: a Gimmick is often appropriate, and may be used for the sixth and subsequent Traits regardless of how the original traits were generated. Optional: The ref may choose to allocate a sixth trait to any character continuing from one session to the next, not just those that lasted the entire session. Traits are powerful resources and should be in high demand.
33 34 As soon as I could get away, I planned to skip town: went to my deposit box and found it empty. The bank had my signature, saying I had removed everything yesterday. Of course, I hadn’t planned on being in this alley, either, with pink foam bubbling out of a hole in my chest. I can hear it, the sucking chest wound. I’m short of breath and I can’t feel my legs. I try and hold my bank receipt over the hole, which makes breathing a bit easier. Foam still bubbles through my fingers. It’s getting dark, and I hate that my last thought might be recognizing the irony that Fourearlier I was haemorrhaging only money.
4. Conflict
There will be several scenes in a session. A player character could be logically absent from a scene sometimes, but the game works best if everyone is there. You’re pros. You may not like being part of a team, but you do what needs doing. While the mission declares what characters will be trying to accomplish in a session, a scene is a period of role-playing that centers around a specific topic or location. It can be completely free-form, with players narrating their actions and riffing off each others’ improvisation, but whenever it’s clear that resolution is needed, the scene moves to a conflict. This is a mechanical way to generate more scene narration while resolving an issue using dice. Usually this means violence. A scene might have up to a half-hour’s discussion about the plan for a heist and then go to conflict in order to find out how well that plan worked. Typically the first scene has players begin by talking about their Every time anything complicated starts to go down, whether mission: they should try to set the tone for all that follows, it’s investigation detail or a gunfight or even just an important though the ref is there to steer things if the players are at a loss bargaining session, go to the dice. Keep in mind that it’s or lack initiative. Each mission has two objectives, and possible—even likely—that in any conflict someone could is played out in scenes. For each scene, there is the possibility decide to move on and have the character leave the game of conflict, and for each scene with conflict, it is possible there through death or some other means, so don’t bother if it’s not is a principal involved. A principal is a named NPC that a big deal. We don’t roll to pick locks, but rather start rolling the ref has prepared to be a key part of the story. The for the whole damned burglary (which is resolved as a single scene after any conflict with a principal is always a retaliation. scene). Each conflict is played out in rounds, and each player Each scene with a conflict is determined to be a that is part of the scene has the ability to roll dice once per success or a failure. A conflict is over when the opposition round. Only rarely do conflicts last more than a few rounds. takes a second stage effect (success) or when there are no agents left in action (failure). An agent leaves the action in one Hollowpoint is built on a premise of escalation: regardless of three ways: she takes a second stage effect and can no longer of what is happening in the scene, each conflict is a bit act, she moves on (see below), or she flees the scene. harder for the players than the one before. Players therefore have incentives not to go to the dice. But when a conflict happens, everyone in the scene is able to contribute. 4.1. DICE POOLS A typical session might break down like this: Hollowpoint uses a dice pool system to resolve conflicts, so it Mission (Objective 1) works best if everyone each has a handful of dice that they can Scene use. Each round, every player involved in a conflict Scene with Conflict rolls a number of dice equal to the rank of the skill Scene with Conflict with Principal they have chosen for the round. Teamwork negotiation, Scene with Conflict (Retaliation) burning Traits, and some rank benefits might add more to that Mission (Objective 2) handful. Scene When rolling, players are looking for matching sets, which Scene with Conflict with Principal are two or more dice with the same value. A set can be Scene with Conflict (Retaliation) described by its length (the number of dice in the Scene set) and its value (the number on the face of the dice Scene with Conflict in the set), always in that order. This example presents two planned conflicts for each Example. Constan has declared COOL, which is rank 4, and Objective, one with a principal and one without. Players may has 2 dice from burning a Trait, so he rolls six dice. He rolls 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, and 5. That’s two sets: three threes and a pair of be able to accomplish mission objectives without ever meeting fives, or 3x3, 2x5. The 2 isn’t part of a set. In the case of 2x5, a principal. It might take three conflicts to achieve the goal, or the length is 2, the value is 5; in the case of 3x3, both the it might only take one. Player ingenuity matters. length and the value are 3. 36 Every time anything complicated starts to go down, whether it’s investigation detail or a gunfight or even just an important bargaining session, go to the dice. Keep in mind that it’s possible—even likely—that in any conflict someone could decide to move on and have the character leave the game through death or some other means, so don’t bother if it’s not a big deal. We don’t roll to pick locks, but rather start rolling for the whole damned burglary (which is resolved as a single scene). Each scene with a conflict is determined to be a success or a failure. A conflict is over when the opposition takes a second stage effect (success) or when there are no agents left in action (failure). An agent leaves the action in one of three ways: she takes a second stage effect and can no longer act, she moves on (see below), or she flees the scene.
4.1. DICE POOLS Hollowpoint uses a dice pool system to resolve conflicts, so it works best if everyone each has a handful of dice that they can use. Each round, every player involved in a conflict rolls a number of dice equal to the rank of the skill they have chosen for the round. Teamwork negotiation, burning Traits, and some rank benefits might add more to that handful. When rolling, players are looking for matching sets, which are two or more dice with the same value. A set can be described by its length (the number of dice in the set) and its value (the number on the face of the dice in the set), always in that order. Example. Constan has declared COOL, which is rank 4, and has 2 dice from burning a Trait, so he rolls six dice. He rolls 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, and 5. That’s two sets: three threes and a pair of fives, or 3x3, 2x5. The 2 isn’t part of a set. In the case of 2x5, the length is 2, the value is 5; in the case of 3x3, both the length and the value are 3. 37 Sets can be compared: 3x3 is longer and lower than 2x5; 2x5 is shorter and higher than 3x3. Often sets will be ranked. In each round of a conflict, for example, all the sets rolled are ranked, and longest, highest sets go first. Example. Anne rolls three sets, 2x2, 2x4, 2x5; Brandon rolls 2x4; Constan 3x1, and the ref rolls 4x2, 2x6, and 2x1. If we rank all eight sets with the longest, highest sets first, we have this: 4x2 (ref); 3x1 (Constan); 2x6 (ref), 2x5 (Anne), 2x4 (both Anne and Brandon), 2x2 (Anne); 2x1 (ref). In the event of a tie players always act first. In this case, since Anne and Brandon both have 2x4 and both are players, they would decide between themselves who acts first. The referee describes the conflict and the opposition, making clear what everyone stands to gain. If success in this conflict will resolve a mission objective this must be declared clearly before anything further happens. The referee will take dice according to the current level of escalation and must also establish whether or not a mission principal is involved. Characters that are not relevant to a scene do not participate in it (for example, a scene with one guy talking to one other guy does not necessarily need more people, and need not be a conflict). Characters who have a second stage effect may not continue to participate in conflicts. For the Referee. For the first conflict in a session the referee takes two dice for every player at the table, including herself. So for a table with one referee and three players, the ref takes eight dice to run the opposition in the first conflict. Every time a conflict ends with the agents succeeding, the ref amps it up— the next conflict gets two more dice. This base number of dice is the level of escalation. So if the agents win three conflicts in a row, the fourth will have the ref starting at an escalation level of fourteen dice (4x2 for the players; 3x2 for previous successes; 8+6=14). The ref also gets two dice added for escalation if the players have all fled the scene; that shouldn’t happen though; see “4.6. Ending a Conflict” on page 52. 38 The ref will choose what skill the opposition is using (that is, what effect she hopes to achieve against the players) before the dice are rolled. Because the opposition may represent a body of people, an organization, or something else entirely, the ref may use any skill and all rolls that round will generate the associated effects. It might be the same skill over and over again or the ref might choose to switch things up, depending on the way the conflict evolves. Whenever a principal is involved in a conflict, two dice are added to the referee’s pool and the pool must be split into two. The split doesn’t need to be even (indeed, it can be with whatever balance the referee likes, but equal pools are usually the most effective) but one of the two pools is identified as belonging to the principal, and the referee’s narration will reflect that. The two pools are rolled separately just like player pools. It may be easier to use different coloured dice in each pool, so that one colour is used for the principal’s dice, and another for the rest of the opposition’s dice. The extra two dice do not add to the escalation value for the purpose of calculating the number of dice for the next scene. The introduction of a principal into a conflict will typically create more sets for the players to face, but they wont be as long and so easier to spoil. It also makes the opposition more resistant to damage, since the principal also needs to take a second stage effect to be removed from active play in a conflict (so the players need to get four successful hits instead of two). It is possible for a principal to be taken out, leaving the ref with a reduced pool for the remainder of the combat; with a principal, the opposition is treated as two separate characters, each of which make sets and take effects. Further, when a conflict involves a principal, the ref has the option to invoke two skills, one for each group of dice rolled (one for the principal itself, and one for the rest of the opposition). 39 Example: In a conflict against three players, the referee has 14 dice to roll each round, including two for a principal. One character was Bleeding out in the last conflict, but the player decided not to move on: she therefore carries a first-stage effect, Shot, into this conflict, which is a face-off between the players and a rogue hit team led by Madame Defarges. The ref decides that while the hit team is using KILL. Madame Defarges is using her COOL. Since the two dice pools are kept separate anyway, this is not problematic. For the Player. In any conflict during the mission, the players will narrate what they want their characters to do and suggest a skill that matches it. Each player declares the skill to use in the conflict this round, and the rank of that skill is the number of dice in the player’s pool. This determines their effect—what will happen to people that cannot resist them. Players will need to sell their choice— describe how their skill bears on the problem—and it better be good. The table should mock weak choices. When everyone involved has declared, each gets her pool ready. Bids are made for teamwork dice, which are resolved (how to do this is described below).
4.2. THE FIGHT Conflict happens in rounds, follow this sequence: 1. Each player picks the skill their character will use for the round and takes one die per rank in the skill they have selected. 2. Once per conflict, players may bid for teamwork support. See “4.2.2. Teamwork” on page 42. 3. Go to the dice. All players with dice roll them and rank sets by length and value. 4. At any time, players may burn one or more traits to get two extra dice (per trait) to add to their roll right away, and adjust sets accordingly. If you burn a character trait, it is gone until the end of the session. 40 5. Knock out sets and determine effects. 6. Narrate as you go. If anyone is still standing, repeat! This is not a rigorous sequence: in particular step six (narrate) is happening all the time.
4.2.1. Skill Choosing a skill that’s appropriate but low can be mitigated by teamwork—your participation might be more useful by offering (or receiving) a willing assist. So pick a skill that fits the scene regardless of proficiency. A character always has the option to flee the scene: tail between the legs, they can leave the conflict to the other agents. Everyone at the table may make clucking noises at them, but at least they are alive. 41 4.2.2. Teamwork At the start of the session, the ref builds a teamwork pool: five dice for every character are placed in a bowl in the middle of the table. Whenever a character moves on and a new character is introduced, the ref adds five more dice to this pool. These dice represent support from the team and the agency and are a limited resource that is available to enhance the performance of the agents. Once per conflict players may ask for support from the team. The request must be made before dice are rolled. The player asking for support narrates why he deserves help and who he is leaning on to get it done. The helper cannot have a second stage effect and must already be part of the scene. Perhaps he suggests, “I am raining lead on the bad guys and using Bobby here as a human shield.” Bobby’s player now has a choice. He can say okay or he can say, “Fuck That.” If he says yes, then the player requesting support takes the dice from the hand of the helping player, who now is out of the conflict for the round (this means that, whatever the story is, the agent helping cannot be harmed this round). The helper’s dice are added to the pool of the player who has asked for help. If the player says “Fuck That”, he takes two dice from the hand of the person who had asked for help. Calling for help makes you look small and people don’t want to help someone who’s always whining. Asking for help risks making you weaker. A player who has been rejected may choose to take dice from the teamwork pool. There’s no limit to the number of dice that can be taken in this way, though taking too many will bite you in unexpected places, and the only way to replace these dice is by introducing a new character. So ask if you need help, but you risk hurting the team long- term because you’re weak. The ref shouldn’t allow players to negotiate these things. Players find out what the 42characters do when they ask for the dice. The player receiving help is obliged to explain the nature of the assistance received as part of his narration. It may still come from his teammates (they get to do their own action as well as provide the needed assistance to the weak link), or it may come from the agency though the introduction of an NPC or some other story element. The ability to say Fuck That puts real pressures on teamwork. That’s a good thing. Do you help if asked? Do you ask, thinking you’ll be rejected so you can raid the teamwork pool? How long can characters work together under extreme circumstances as a team?
4.2.3. Fan Mail Optionally, the teamwork pool can also be used to reward awesome narration. If you tell a story that just rocks, other players at the table can reach into the teamwork pool and hand you a die. You can hang onto the die (or dice, if you tell really good stories) and use it, once, in any future roll. If you hang on to the dice you can save them for super awesome final confrontations. But there’s a risk: too much fan mail makes you cocky and you could end up with dangerously long sets. Hilarity ensues.
4.2.4. Go to the dice Determine the order of the sets, knock them out, and inflict effects. Narrate as you go. Repeat until the conflict is determined to be a success or failure. An objective can only be considered accomplished if the conflict is a success. Each player, including the ref, rolls her pool. Once the players see the dice, they sort them into sets: each set has a length and a value. So if you roll three fours, we notate it 3x4; the set’s length is three and its value is four. Organize your final pool result into sets, putting longest sets at the top. Order sets of the same length by the number (length by value). For example, 4x3 3x1 2x6 2x4 2x2. This determines the order of action. 43 At any time, players may burn traits to add dice: cross off any trait, narrating the loss, and roll two more dice for your pool. That ceramic hula doll you got in Utah (wasn’t that a time?) falls to the pavement as you knock it from the ledge trying to bring your rifle to bear on a moving target. Using up the trait doesn’t need logically to confer an advantage—you are getting an advantage by ignoring, destroying, or losing things that you thought mattered. In play, the loss must enter the scene. There is no other requirement on the narration for burning a trait. The longest, highest set remaining is the next hit that is processed. Long sets go before shorter ones. The longest, highest value set goes first. In the event of a tie, players go first. The owner selects a target and narrates how her declared skill is being brought to bear on the target in the context of the conflict. If the target has any sets, the target must remove one die from one of those sets—the narration should reflect the fact that the opponent is suppressed in some fashion, but nothing further. When facing down a lone gunman, this may involve him seeking cover. When facing down a dozen street thugs, it might well be an injury or a death, but the “gang” is only inconvenienced.
44 When a hit is scored it removes a die from the shortest, highest set on the target with the fewest sets. A set with length two is reduced to a singleton. It remains in play (in case the player chooses to burn a trait) but it falls out of the action sequence. Losing a die may force the player to reorder her sets (if, for example, a set three long is reduced to only two long). If the target has no sets, she gets an effect determined by the skill the attacker is using. Narrate the result. Once resolved, the narrator removes the set that was just used. Example: Late in a fight, the Last Samurai (played by the ref) rolls 6x3, 4x6, 2x5. The Nice Old Man rolls no sets, and has no aspects left to burn. Shadowfoot rolls 2x6, 2x5. 6x3 goes first, and hits the Nice Old Man (who has the fewest sets), who is now hesitant. 4x6 goes next, and the Nice Old Man is babbling and out of the conflict. Shadowfoot’s 2x6 takes the opposition’s last set (2x5), leaving Shadowfoot’s final set inflicting a hit on the opposition—the Last Samurai is now shot. Seeing his last ally fall beside him, Shadowfoot flees the scene rather than be hit himself in the next round. The narrator with the best set may not pass—getting a great (long) result forces you to act, and maybe prematurely. A 5x6 might mean you jump out from behind cover, guns blazing, only to discover the safety is on. You spoil one die in your opponent’s sets, but that’s come at a cost of many of the dice in your pool; you have basically blown your wad. When bidding for teamwork dice, this is one reason not to be too greedy: taking too much can hurt you in the long term. When the opposition hits the players, it is the ref’s responsibility to hit hard. Have no qualms about picking on the player with the fewest sets, as long as the story allows that comfortably. Every combat is unique, but the referee should generally level the same skill offensively against a player already on the ropes. Because character death is a choice that resides entirely with the player, this is not picking on an individual unfairly (if that’s something you care about). Repeat for each set on the table in order. 45 4.2.5. Effects When you get hit in Hollowpoint you take effects from the damage. If you cannot stop a hit from an KILL roll, you are Shot (a first stage effect). If you are already Shot then you are Bleeding out (a second stage effect). Following is a list of effects associated with each skill. Feel free to invent alternate names for effects to suit the scene: “Stabbed” might better serve the story sometimes. What’s important, though, is that the next time the character is hit with a KILL shot, he is “Bleeding out”. Similarly, if someone has been successfully framed by a CON roll, “Wanted” might be more suitable. KILL CON First: Shot (or Cut). First: Marked. Second: Bleeding out. Second: Suckered.
TERROR DIG First: Hesitant. First: Exposed Second: Babbling. Second: Hunted.
TAKE COOL First: Missing something. First: Dazzled. Second: Emptied out. Second: Outclassed.
If other skills are in play, other effects need to be determined:
SEDUCE KUNG FU First: Charmed. First: Bloodied. Second: Fucked. Second: Defeated.
TEMPT WATC H First: Compromised. First: Observed. Second: Broken. Second: Spotlit. 46 HURT BOSS First: Screaming. First: Cowed. Second: Damaged. Second: Chastened.
Even the magic skills work this way:
ILLUSION NECROMANCY First: Confused. First: Disensouled. Second: Hallucinating. Second: Undead.
Players can take damage from all sorts of skills, but they are only in danger if they take two hits from the same skill in a conflict.Characters who take a second effect from the same skill can no longer participate in the conflict: they remain in the scene until it is over or they choose to move on, but they are unable to participate in a conflict in any active way. Character death is always a player choice.
4.2.6. Moving on Once all sets are gone anyone with a second stage effect may choose to move on. This character will be taken out of play, either by being dead or in jail or whatever is appropriate to the effect. If a complication is relevant to the context of the conflict, the player of any character with that complication that moves on, wins. Moving on doesn’t need to mean death, and players are encouraged to find an exit story that is thematically appropriate. Moving on is a choice you make to retire the character and start a new one. You are never forced to move on. If a character has moved on, the conflict continues, but with the reduced number of characters. More than one character may move on in a given round or a given conflict. 47 4.2.7. Wash If no one has taken an effect and no traits have been burned, 4.3. THE CATCH this round was a wash. On a wash all characters receive When establishing the parameters of a scene, the referee an effect from their own attacking skill and players may choose to set a catch to reflect a separate goal that the narrate the results—what went wrong that led to this disaster: players need to achieve. Some conflicts may require special the assassin is shot; the femme fatale falls for her mark. A wash circumstances to resolve—a thing needs to be stolen (TAKE) or inverts the expected result and has the character impacted by a fact needs to be discovered (DIG) or something like that—as the skill she was using and not by the opposition’s skill. The well as there being a narrative victory. In these cases, the ref only way to avoid this is for someone, player or opposition, takes three dice from his pool and sets a catch on the scene: a to take an effect every round. This puts further pressure on to certain skill must be used to take the three dice over the course burn traits in order to achieve hits: nobody wants a wash. of the conflict. The dice are rolled and set in the middle of the table. Each number rolled in the catch is the value of 4.2.8. Special Abilities the set needed to remove that die. One die is removed Back when we were making characters and you first wrote with any set from the specified skill at the appropriate value or “Agent” in stage one, we told you each rank also has a special higher. These dice serve as a clock: ability. How these work should make sense now: Example: the ref rolls the catch dice and sets a 2, 4, 4 in the middle of the table (on a book maybe, where they won’t Agent — an agent can take one for the team. Any time the interfere with other dice rolled), stipulating that they can referee announces a hit on a character (whether knocking out only be removed with TAKE. So while much of the team is a die or causing an effect), any agent may volunteer to take the blasting away, Jonah rolls his TAKE skill, and gets 2x3 and 2x2. Either set is enough to knock out the 2, but at the end of the hit instead on her dice (if she has sets to knock out) or on her round the two fours remain on the clock. Jonah can use the character. The agent can do this even if he has not rolled dice remaining set to knock out some of the opposition, if he can this round, because he was helping a teammate. produce a story that sells it. Operative — the operative is here to teach. When anyone calls If the opposition suffers a second stage effect before all of the for help and is denied (even if denied by the operative), the catch dice are taken, no matter what the other results, the operative can take two dice from the teamwork pool. conflict is a failure. Handler — the Handler leads from behind. Any time a player The referee should declare the specific purpose of the catch refuses to help another, the Handler can help instead. They (what’s to be taken, etc.). The referee may always choose to can force their help on others, and stay safe in the bargain. knock out a set that is attacking the catch dice. Players should use their special ability as often as they are able. 48 4.3. THE CATCH When establishing the parameters of a scene, the referee may choose to set a catch to reflect a separate goal that the players need to achieve. Some conflicts may require special circumstances to resolve—a thing needs to be stolen (TAKE) or a fact needs to be discovered (DIG) or something like that—as well as there being a narrative victory. In these cases, the ref takes three dice from his pool and sets a catch on the scene: a certain skill must be used to take the three dice over the course of the conflict. The dice are rolled and set in the middle of the table. Each number rolled in the catch is the value of the set needed to remove that die. One die is removed with any set from the specified skill at the appropriate value or higher. These dice serve as a clock: Example: the ref rolls the catch dice and sets a 2, 4, 4 in the middle of the table (on a book maybe, where they won’t interfere with other dice rolled), stipulating that they can only be removed with TAKE. So while much of the team is blasting away, Jonah rolls his TAKE skill, and gets 2x3 and 2x2. Either set is enough to knock out the 2, but at the end of the round the two fours remain on the clock. Jonah can use the remaining set to knock out some of the opposition, if he can produce a story that sells it. If the opposition suffers a second stage effect before all of the catch dice are taken, no matter what the other results, the conflict is a failure. The referee should declare the specific purpose of the catch (what’s to be taken, etc.). The referee may always choose to knock out a set that is attacking the catch dice. 49 4.4. SKILL CHECKS Sometimes in a scene without a conflict the players will still want a means to determine whether or not some action is successful. Do this with a skill check: one player (only) rolls an appropriate skill and sees if he can make a set. If a set is not made on the initial roll, it can only be accomplished by that player burning traits. Skill checks are at the discretion of the referee and requires that there is no clear opposition (which would demand a conflict). The referee must state clearly what the stakes of the roll are: what, exactly, is accomplished with a success. There is no teamwork here, and the process has advantages and disadvantages for the players. Players can move the plot forward in a clear, discrete way: a specific piece of information can be gathered (DIG), or a small private army can be assembled (BOSS), etc. If a skill check fails, however, it is established categorically that the stakes sought are not available to the players for the session. This then puts considerable pressure on the player to burn traits to achieve a success. Further, if the skill check is at all related to either of the mission objectives, a successful skill check counts as a success in terms of escalation, adding two dice to the next opposed conflict.
4.5. NARRATION While all this is happening, everyone at the table is offering narration. When you use a set from your pool to knock out a die from your opposition or to inflict some harm, you are invited to narrate what happens. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—it’s obvious that bullets are flying and people are ducking, getting hit, or fleeing the scene. But a little colour can liven up the exchange, especially if it involves a trait you burned to get your sets. 50 There are clues in your dice. Very long sets, for example, go first and so imply extremely fast reflex action. When that sucks (and it often will), make sure that’s in your narration—if all you have is 5x5 and your opponent has four sets of pairs, you get to go first and knock one pair out. Then he pummels you to death with his three remaining sets. Obviously you were brash (leaping from hiding to discover ten assailants instead of two) or unprepared (stepping into the open and switching to full-auto only to discover your magazine is empty). When you get a lot of short sets, the opposite is happening—you are being methodical and effective and taking your time. Make sure your narration addresses the skill you’re using. When you’re killing, talk about your tools. When you’re terrorizing, talk about your victim. When you’re using your cool, talk about your clothes, your cigarillo, and your asymmetric smile. The referee should pad out narration where it’s thin and summarize the scene every now and then. Bring in collateral damage (the soda machine full of holes, the screams of the innocent patrons, the omnipresent shattered glass) and reaction shots. Keep it fast and violent and hand it back to the players right away. The referee must facilitate a good story–a violent story that allows for individuals to be in the spotlight frequently enough for them to shine. Or get hurt, as it happens. Because the opposition’s dice pool is undifferentiated (it represents a group of characters, who might not all be performing the same action), the referee has a lot of freedom to interpret the effect of sets. Not all of it must be offensive, or even tied to the specific skill that has been declared: if the effect of one of the opposition’s sets is to spoil a player’s set, the narration provided by the referee may be indirect: “You’re unable to get a clear shot; there are too many shadows” (spoiling a KILL shot) or: “The file has been corrupted, and won’t be able to be used as evidence” (spoiling an DIG set) or: “Spinning your knife on your fingertip reminds Lt. Thorpe vaguely of a circus clown he saw in his youth” (spoiling a COOL set). 51 Despite all of the rules for running a conflict, all that is dependent on the table’s ability to produce a satisfactory story. If it just doesn’t work (e.g. a thug waggling his sword gets a TERROR hit on someone who is not in the room, but across the street sitting at a computer keyboard), then the table has the right to adjust the outcome accordingly. Sure, you’re going to do this anyway, but here it is in black and white: the table should feel free to adjust any of the rules if it helps to produce a more memorable story. So for example, one table might decide that they want to choose what set their hits take out from their opponents, instead of always hitting the shortest, highest set of the person with the fewest. No sweat. As long as both sides get the same ability, there’s no problem; the shortest, highest set is likely to be the optimal choice in any case, but behold—you now have free will. If each player is using a different colour of dice and another colour again being used for the teamwork pool, then there is an additional level of information available as the table works together to tell the story. Example: Donald rolls his five blue dice in CON and convinces Corin not to use his four yellow dice on his KILL roll but to help in a teamwork bid, so he’s got more dice now. Donald rolls and gets 3x5, 2x6, 2x2. Looking at the colours, though, Donald finds that there’s a yellow in every set, suggesting Corin offers enthusiastic support for Donald’s lying schemes.
4.6. ENDING A CONFLICT A conflict is over when the opposition takes a second stage effect (in which case it is a success) or when there are no agents left in action (in which case it is a failure). Agents may flee the scene and choose to leave the action at the start of any round. If all the agents flee, though, the referee adds two dice for escalation. Agents shouldn’t be chickenshit and need to just suck it up. This rule shouldn’t need to come into play if the players have a sense of who agents are. At the end of a conflict, the results need to be determined. 52 1. Was the conflict a success for the players (or did everyone flee the scene)? If it was, the next conflict will escalate. 2. Was an objective resolved? An objective is met by a conflict when one of two things happens; either the stakes established that a player victory would fulfill an objective or someone in the conflict moved on while revealing a complication that resolves or renders irrelevant an objective. Example: Ephram is pursuing the objective, “Identify the turncoat” and his complication is “I am the turncoat”. In a shoot-out he winds up bleeding out and gasps out a con- fession with his dying breath and moves on. The objec- tive is resolved regardless of whether or not the conflict was otherwise a success. 3. Does anyone want to move on? Any character with a second stage effect may choose to move on. This might involve more narration from the player. Make it good. 4. Fix effects. After any conflict, second stage effects become first stage effects. First stage effects remain through an entire session. A brief narration of the transition is nice: “Bah, it’s really not that bad; I’ve broken that wrist before” or “I didn’t need all that shit anyway— I’m more free with less stuff.” 5. Did the conflict involve a principal? If so, the next scene will be a retaliation, regardless of whether or not the players succeeded. 6. Does anyone win? If a character has moved on and worked in a complication, that player wins. Pour a drink. 7. Replace lost characters. A character that has moved on is replaced with a new character. Put the old character sheet to the side, and make a new one. A player that wins by moving on may create a new character at the next rank. Agents are replaced with Operatives; Operatives are replaced with Handlers. A player that wins with a Handler has won the whole game and totally rules. Stop playing, everyone take a drink, slap backs, light cigars.53 You are done. When the new character comes on the scene, she has been sent • long sets are inefficient but fast (they go off early but they to get the team on track, and so is in a position of authority expend a lot of dice for the same effect as fewer dice), and (regardless of rank). The ref should have her start by taking more dice means longer sets. That is to the ref’s advantage over a scene in which she tells the team what went wrong, why and is why going up against a principal can really hurt. she was sent to fix it, and what they are going to do next.The As a consequence, it is rarely a straightforward calculation to “dressing down” is a major perk of moving on. take teamwork dice or to accept a request for help. To a large Part of the authority the player has during this scene is the degree it depends on the opposition. authority to change a mission objective. If any objective It is possible to wind up in a position where the players has not yet been met, or if the story so far suggests have won every conflict but failed their objectives. This will an amusing way in which an achieved objective might make subsequent conflicts increasingly difficult to win: the have been a Bad Idea, the player doing this dressing- characters may have no traits or teamwork dice left and yet the down may propose a change of objective to the opposition will have tons of dice to bring to bear (two extra referee. If the referee accepts (and she might offer for every player character victory so far, thanks to escalation). some ideas too) then the objective is changed. There are a few courses of action open to the players now: Example: The mission had begun with two objectives: • Go out in a blaze of glory. Confront that final conflict Objective 1: kill the royal family head on, knowing you are almost certainly going to lose. Objective 2: maintain chaos until parliament can assert itself This is your Butch Cassidy moment. You are all fucked. In the course of fulfilling Objective 1, the players invent • Approach the next conflict with the goal a means to blast away most of their targets. During the course of a duel with the cyborg Lord Chamberlain, one of resolving the objective by revealing a player moves on, revealing that he himself was fifth in line complication and moving on. When a character is for the throne (a complication the player had written for the replaced, five new dice get added to the teamwork pool. character once the mission was assigned). • Slink away. You blew your wad and failed. The enemy is When the new character comes in, as part of the dressing now entrenched and unassailable. Roll up new characters down the player changes objectives: in part due to her loyalty to her old character, the second objective is changed from because these ones are too attached to their lives to random urban terror to, “Insert an Agent as a lone surviving adequately perform their duties. They survive by harassing royal family member”. citizens for smokes and spare change. They are losers.
4.7. TACTICS 4.8. SAMPLE CONFLICT The dice system is not obvious. There is no simple progression Ref: You’ve reached the warehouse and it’s the dead of night. from crappy to awesome by adding dice. Consider: No moon, no clouds, and no noise. You pull up in your black SUV and check gear. Your objective here is simple—you need • no matter how many dice are in a pool, there can never to get Annalise out of the warehouse alive. How you do that be more than six sets, so the only way to get more than is your business. I’m taking 12 dice for this—last conflict was 10 dice and you won it, so we escalate. What are your skills to be six sets is to have more than one pool. That’s the player’s used in this first round? 54advantage. • long sets are inefficient but fast (they go off early but they expend a lot of dice for the same effect as fewer dice), and more dice means longer sets. That is to the ref’s advantage and is why going up against a principal can really hurt. As a consequence, it is rarely a straightforward calculation to take teamwork dice or to accept a request for help. To a large degree it depends on the opposition. It is possible to wind up in a position where the players have won every conflict but failed their objectives. This will make subsequent conflicts increasingly difficult to win: the characters may have no traits or teamwork dice left and yet the opposition will have tons of dice to bring to bear (two extra for every player character victory so far, thanks to escalation). There are a few courses of action open to the players now: • Go out in a blaze of glory. Confront that final conflict head on, knowing you are almost certainly going to lose. This is your Butch Cassidy moment. You are all fucked. • Approach the next conflict with the goal of resolving the objective by revealing a complication and moving on. When a character is replaced, five new dice get added to the teamwork pool. • Slink away. You blew your wad and failed. The enemy is now entrenched and unassailable. Roll up new characters because these ones are too attached to their lives to adequately perform their duties. They survive by harassing citizens for smokes and spare change. They are losers.
4.8. SAMPLE CONFLICT Ref: You’ve reached the warehouse and it’s the dead of night. No moon, no clouds, and no noise. You pull up in your black SUV and check gear. Your objective here is simple—you need to get Annalise out of the warehouse alive. How you do that is your business. I’m taking 12 dice for this—last conflict was 10 dice and you won it, so we escalate. What are your skills to be used in this first round? 55 Belle: KILL—I’m setting up in the trees with my PSG-1 sniper rifle. I’ve got four dice. Cabe: TERROR—I am going to bust in and wreak havoc and take Annalise from them with my five dice. Dern: CON—I’ll leverage all that violence to convince them to let her go. Ref: You all need to bid for teamwork dice. Dern: Everyone done? Okay, I bid for none. Belle: I want Dern helping me. Let’s kill ‘em all. Cabe: I want Dern frightening the shit out of them. Dern: Nobody wants me talking much do they? Ref: It’s your call, Dern. Help Belle KILL or Cabe cause TERROR, or stick with your CON of three. Dern: If I say Fuck That to them both, do I get four dice? Ref: Sure – two from each. Dern: That’s pretty awesome. So that’d give me seven, but hobble the rest of you. Cool, but probably not worth it. I’ll help Cabe. Cabe gets all three dice in my hand. Is that right? Ref: Exactly. Cabe (grins, eyeing the Ref’s 12 dice): Cool. I’ve got Dern helping me. He’s getting out his bullhorn or whatever and I tell him to put that shit away and back me up when I start smashing heads. Ref: I kinda like the scene where you both call for help and Dern ignores Belle to go work up close in person with Cabe. Belle: I scowl and climb my tree. Ref: Okay, gimme your rolls. Cabe: Okay I got TERROR at 5 and three more from Dern. So 8 dice. 4x4 2x6 and a 5. Do I throw that away? Ref: Keep it for now. In case you decide to burn something. Belle: I have KILL at 4 and I got...2,3,4,6...crap. I’m going to burn Still human right away to get a bead on the leader and drop him right away. I’m just that cold now. And get...a pair of 3s. So that’s a 3x3 and that’s it. 56 Ref: The opposition is rolling KILL—they just want to you all dead, and maybe Annalise too. Here we have 5x1, 2x6, 2x3. I’ll discard my singles ‘cause I don’t have any traits. So the 5x1 goes first—as Cabe and Dern and heading to the front door, the rattle of automatic fire rings out—they are shooting through the door at you. Ponk ponk ponk, it fills with holes. That takes one of Cabe’s sixes, spoiling that set. Belle: It doesn’t hit me? I have the fewest sets. Ref: I thought you were off hiding up a tree. Cabe’s right in front of them, and has Dern at his side. He’s the target. OK? Cabe: No sweat. I still have 4x4. Ref: And it goes next. Cabe: BOOM! Me and Dern barrel through the door straight into the gunfire and while he shoots at them I wade in and punch one to death with a big dangerous grin on my face. Dern: Yow. Ref: Okay, my shortest, highest set is the 2x6, so I’ll remove one of the sixes, leaving me with 2x3. Belle: Doesn’t matter. My 3x3 is next—as they bust through the door I pop the guy holding Annalise. That takes their last set. Cabe: Damn. I’m going to burn something. I want some damage done. I’m Unshaven and don’t care. I figure I resemble every wildman in the woods that pop culture has put into their heads since childhood, and the fear we’re causing is pulling up childhood nightmares for these guys. Ref: Alright, that’s fair. Cross it off and roll two more. Cabe (rolling): A one and a five. Woo! That’s a pair with my fives now. That makes them Hesitant. The terror has taken effect. Ref: Okay amidst the gunfire and the howling and the cursing, Cabe looms large. People are dying with no known reason and Annalise is free from her captor. She rushes towards Dern. (Ref raises his eyebrows.) Dern: What? (Ref raises his eyebrows again.) 57 Dern: What!? Oh alright. The girl rushes towards me with Cabe: Your 2x5 matches mine. Who goes first? open arms and cries “Daddy!” Ref: You do. Cabe: Daddy? Cabe: Okay, I’m stuffing this hat down the throat of the Belle: Daddy? bastard that shot Dern. I take his 5. Dern: Later. Ref: I’m out then. Your 2x3? Cabe: As in “Who’s your...?”, I hope. Cabe: That’s it, they fold. What’s the second stage of TERROR? Dern: Later! Ref: Babbling. Ref: Okay, round two. Full dice again. Dern, you’re the only one who qualifies for teamwork dice because Belle and Cabe Cabe: Cool. Okay, then, they are now Babbling, wetting have both bid for them this scene. Want any? themselves from my show of extreme anger and force. They drop their guns and I line them up and start breaking fingers. Dern: Nah, with Hesitant already on I need to give support. Ref: Good. That’s a success for you guys. Annalise runs to Belle: Cabe and I don’t want to overshadow Dern. This is Dern. “Daddy! Oh Daddy, you’re hurt.” Dern that’s your obviously all about him. complication—how do you want to deal with your Bleeding Ref (rolling): Okay, the bad guys get 3x3 3x2 2x6 and 2x5. out? They are still using KILL. Dern: Annalise, baby, I’m so sorry. Cough cough. I’m so sorry Cabe: I only have five dice now but I’ll burn myBlack leather to get you involved in this. Cough cough. hat for two more. Still using TERROR. I stuff it down one of Cabe: I’m cryin’. the guys’ throat. So seven dice and I got 2x5 and 2x3 and a bunch of singles. Crap. Dern: Dern is moving on. I think he expires there, coughing up blood on his daughter’s gingham dress. Belle: I keep shooting into the crowd there. Maybe we can get a break. Only four dice on KILL, though. I got...2x2. Ref: Okay, you get to build an Operative then. Cabe and Belle, you round up these thugs and get Annalise to the car. Dern: Hey guys, guys, it doesn’t have to go down this way. Then haul in Dern’s body. There’s going to be hell to pay for Cabe, rein it in, man, we don’t want to kill all of them. Not this fuck up. Dern’s dead, man. Annalise is in tears but maybe like the last...unpleasantness. My CON is good for five dice. not so much as you’d expect from watching daddy bleed out And I got...uh, a straight. Nothin. Guess they ain’t in a talking on her picnic outfit.... mood. Ref: Okay, the 3x3 goes first. As Dern is trying to talk down the situation, one of the goons lets off a blast of double- ought into his leg. Dern, you are Shot. That’s a KILL hit. 4.9. CONFLICT, WITH A CATCH Ref: Okay, you’ve arrived in Los Angeles and located Harper’s Dern: Aigh! Motherf.... home. You know the safe is in there and the documents are Ref: Hmm, still me. The 3x2 is up next and I think this guy just in the safe. But the villa he lives in is a maze and a fortress. keeps blasting. Dern, you are now Bleeding out. You need to act fast and get a team in that house right away. I have 12 dice for this scene but I’m taking out three for the Dern: Cough. catch: you need to DIG to find the location of the safe before Ref: Still me. These guys are just not buckling. The 2x6 goes the agents in the house can complete their mission. next and takes Belle’s 2. Someone has spotted your muzzle Amy: Oh crap, so we need to TAKE, obviously, to succeed at flash and is returning fire with a sub-machinegun. Little flecks the objective, but the catch only gets eroded with DIG?. 58of leaves spatter around you. Cabe: Your 2x5 matches mine. Who goes first? Ref: You do. Cabe: Okay, I’m stuffing this hat down the throat of the bastard that shot Dern. I take his 5. Ref: I’m out then. Your 2x3? Cabe: That’s it, they fold. What’s the second stage of TERROR? Ref: Babbling. Cabe: Cool. Okay, then, they are now Babbling, wetting themselves from my show of extreme anger and force. They drop their guns and I line them up and start breaking fingers. Ref: Good. That’s a success for you guys. Annalise runs to Dern. “Daddy! Oh Daddy, you’re hurt.” Dern that’s your complication—how do you want to deal with your Bleeding out? Dern: Annalise, baby, I’m so sorry. Cough cough. I’m so sorry to get you involved in this. Cough cough. Cabe: I’m cryin’. Dern: Dern is moving on. I think he expires there, coughing up blood on his daughter’s gingham dress. Ref: Okay, you get to build an Operative then. Cabe and Belle, you round up these thugs and get Annalise to the car. Then haul in Dern’s body. There’s going to be hell to pay for this fuck up. Dern’s dead, man. Annalise is in tears but maybe not so much as you’d expect from watching daddy bleed out on her picnic outfit....
4.9. CONFLICT, WITH A CATCH Ref: Okay, you’ve arrived in Los Angeles and located Harper’s home. You know the safe is in there and the documents are in the safe. But the villa he lives in is a maze and a fortress. You need to act fast and get a team in that house right away. I have 12 dice for this scene but I’m taking out three for the catch: you need to DIG to find the location of the safe before the agents in the house can complete their mission. Amy: Oh crap, so we need to TAKE, obviously, to succeed at the objective, but the catch only gets eroded with DIG?. 59 Ref: Yes, I think that’s right. Boris: My DIG is pretty good. I’m setting up at the cafe down the street with the team on my headset while I try and hack the city archives for the blueprints to Harper’s villa. Ref: (takes 12 dice and rolls three of them right away. 1, 2, 6: these are placed in the middle of the table.) This is the clock. I’ll roll 9 dice for the rest of the conflict. Amy: I’m setting up a distraction with my shotgun. KILL 5. (She grabs five dice and starts shaking them in her fist, ready to roll.) Carrie: Okay I am dressed in my all-black cat suit with nothing but a rope that makes a nice garotte and my little Walther .380 in an ankle holster. I’ll be using TAKE, I expect, with Amy helping me. Amy, I want you backing me up with GPS and calling out targets. (Carrie takes three dice in her hand for her TAKE and holds out her hand asking for Amy’s dice). Amy: Fuck That! I am in this. My KILL is 5! You want me! Carrie: (glares at Amy and and hands her two of her own dice.) Well, I’m down to just one die now. I’m taking the last three from the teamwork pool. Amy: You gotta have balls of steel in this game, sister. I have my shotgun for busting doors and scaring the shit out of people. But emotionally I’m behind Carrie every step of the way. Ref: Okay, dice out, folks. Initially the opposition is using DIG, attempting to find you out. (Rolls his nine dice.) Amy: Using KILL to start, taking out any guards with my knife. seven dice...3x2 and four useless dice. Boris: DIG, as I hack into the city archives. I have 4 dice...2x1 and 2x6! Woo! Hey, wait: I’m a Operative, and Amy said Fuck That. I’m here to teach. Can I have two more dice? Ref: Sure, it’s not too late. Roll ‘em. Boris: 3, 2. Oh well. I still have two sets. Carrie: I should have used DIG to start, sneaking in from the second storey and eyeballing the place for a likely safe. But I’m committed to my TAKE roll, right? Ref: Yep. 60 Carrie: Okay, I have my one die plus three from the teamwork pool. 2x2, a 4, and a 1. Ref: 3x6, 2x4, 2x3, 2x2. So my 4x6 goes first and I’ll chose to knock out one of Boris’ sets. The 2x6 is gone. The city archives are easy to get into but the Harper house just isn’t in there. As far as the city is concerned, this is an empty lot. Amy: My 3x2, then, takes out one of your 4s. One guard down with a knife in the brain. My smile glints in the starlight. (Ref discards a 4, leaving his 2x3 and 2x2. The 2x3 is up next.) Carrie: Hey, before you go, I’m burning my Bum knee for two dice. I got that in Utah, you all recall, when we got caught on the third floor of a hotel we had to torch. Wasn’t the job, but it seemed the best way to get at the hotel safe was to burn the hotel and sift through the ashes. Who knew thermite would go off by accident like that? Anyway, it’s not everyone who survives a thirty-foot fall with just a limp. Now it throbs and I stumble against the wall, so I get two new dice... (she rolls them.) ...and get 6 and 3. Great, no new sets. The wall is solid. Ref: My 2x3 then. Amy has the fewest sets. Amy: None. Ref: None. A guard hears you, Amy. You are exposed. Carrie: My 2x2 goes before your set, Boris. Stumbling, I knock aside an oil painting of some hunting dogs, and there’s the safe. Harper’s home is now missing something... I found their secret stash. Boris: My 2x1 is clear then and I get one of the clock dice! I’ve found that the tax records point to a dummy corporation that has the house in its database. I’m sifting through that now. Ref: Okay nice round. This time my 9 dice are set to KILL the intruders...3x2, 2x5, 2x4, and two wastes. Boris: I keep using DIG, safe in the internet cafe across the street. I think the barista has just refilled my mochaccino. Amy: Mochaccino? What a lame drink for an agent. You’re sure not using COOL. Boris: Anyway, I roll...2x5, a 4 and a 1. Amy: I aim to KILL that guard that noticed Carrie. Ugh...6, 5, 4, 3, 1. Somebody get me some new dice. 61 Carrie: I’m dealing with this guard too, hoping to get lucky. My KILL is only 2, but you know the drill: no witnesses...4, 3. Crap. Ref: First the 3x2. Amy you are surprised by another guard, who blasts at you with a little Czech sub-machinegun. Plaster and glass chips fly all around you as it ripsaws through where you just were a minute ago, but you catch a .32 round in the thigh. You have no sets so you are shot. Amy: Ow, dammit. I am burning my “gold-plated .25”—the round hits my hold-out gun, ricocheting into my thigh and ruining the piece...I get a 4 and a 2 so I have a 2x4 now. I’m also burning my Icy demeanor—I am pissed and I howl, raising the shotgun...1 and 1. Okay, that’s better. I should have done that right away. Now I also have a 3x1! Ref: And it’s next up. Amy: Boom boom boom. Three quick doses of double-ought at my sneaky adversary. Ref: He’s dead as hell and my 2x5 is ruined. Boris, your 2x5 is up. Boris: I’ll take another die off the clock. One left! This company database is a gold mine...it may have the combination to the safe as well as the location! Carrie: I’ve found the location. We just need the combination, I think loudly to myself. Ref: Okay we have a tie here—Amy has a 2x4 and so do I. Ties go to the players, so Amy you’re up. Amy: I spin and take out Carrie’s assailant with the rest of my ammo, then throw the shotgun aside. Aren’t you glad I was here, Carrie? Ref: Boom, he’s blasted ruining my 2x4. Round three. I am again using KILL as the guards start to swarm in...5x5, 2x1 and garbage. Boris: Stick with the DIG of course—we are almost there! 2x6, 5, 4. Carrie: Back to TAKE now. I think we’ll have the safe this round, and I want to be there. I have 3 in TAKE...2x3, 4. Amy: I am KILL killing these guys while Carrie gets the goods...2x5, 2x1, 6. I’m ripping into them with my bare hands. 62 Boris: Fine, I’m burning my “detective’s badge”. Oh yeah, I used to do this for a living and I’ve always kept the badge. Now it don’t mean nothing. I am the bad guy now. My two new dice are...4,5. Hah! Now I have 2x6, 2x5, and 2x4. Ref: Holy crap! Well, no point in me spoiling your sets, so I think the 5x5 will KILL Amy...another pair of guards emerge from the library firing at you while you reload. You have to cower behind a marble copy of the Venus de Milo and your 2x5 is ruined. Amy: Hah, that won’t be enough! Boris: My 2x6 is next. I have the safe located and transmit the location. It’s behind the painting, Carrie! Ref: Your shiny new 2x5 is next, Boris. Boris: Oh sweet! Well it seems I also have the location of the panic room switch and you guys are in it. Hit the switch and the room seals, opening an escape tunnel to the outside! Ref: That kills my last set, the 2x1. All your sets are now causing effects. Boris: Oh yeah, my 2x4 now too. Here’s the combination, guys! That’s an effect from DIG so.... Ref: Ugh! Harper is exposed! Carrie: I spring the safe and grab the goods with my 2x3. Ref: That was a TAKE effect? Okay. Harper is now missing everything. That’s it! Amy: Wait! As the panic room door is slamming shut, I pull one of the guards halfway in with my 2x1.... All: Ewww. Ref: Slam! Harper’s men are now also shot —I think we could call that bisected maybe. Okay, the clock is gone and I have three different kinds of effect on Harper’s crew, including a double hit from Carrie’s TAKE. Nice work. That’s a success for you guys: Harper is fucked. You have all of his secrets. 63 5. Mission
This chapter is focused on building a session, exploring issues such as structure and pacing that will be of concern mainly to referees. There are no new rules, just discussion, variants, and some more examples. Some of it has been said before and is said again with new context to give you ideas, clarity, or just to hammer it home. This is the ref’s chapter, but any player can benefit from a look through it.
5.1. OBJECTIVES A mission is composed of two clearly stated and connected objectives. These objectives must be stated such that it will be absolutely clear when they have been achieved. 64 He finds a long fork, like the kind used in fondues, and takes it in the wrong hand so he can reach the gash in his right shoulder. He makes the initial probes as he leaves the kitchen. There’s a dappled pattern on the carpet, and he adds to it. He angles the fork up, and shoves it in. He starts rooting around, twisting his neck so he can see the reflection now in the bathroom mirror. He bites his lip until it starts to bleed, and the memories of the evening’sFive mistakes roll over him like the tide coming in at dusk: waves of darkness, each a little bit bigger than the last. As a lightning flash of pain courses through his body to the back of his eyes, he knows that he has found the bullet. His body goes cold, and he starts to sweat, and he thinks that lying on the bathroom floor for just a few minutes will cool him down. But that thought, tempting as it is, is always a mistake. He spends the next ten minutes prying the slug out with a tool ill-designed for the purpose and sits back on the tiled floor to admire his handiwork.
5. Mission
This chapter is focused on building a session, exploring issues such as structure and pacing that will be of concern mainly to referees. There are no new rules, just discussion, variants, and some more examples. Some of it has been said before and is said again with new context to give you ideas, clarity, or just to hammer it home. This is the ref’s chapter, but any player can benefit from a look through it.
5.1. OBJECTIVES A mission is composed of two clearly stated and connected objectives. These objectives must be stated such that it will be absolutely clear when they have been achieved. For example: OPERATION TURNCOAT 1. Identify the agent that has been recruited by house 5.2. EXPLODING INTO ACTION Vermeer to act as warlord. As soon as the mission narration implies a conflict, go to 2. Punish house Vermeer. the dice. The tip-off is that the players are starting to narrate This is given to the players up front. actions relating to their skills—they are sneaking around or investigating or breaking fingers. That doesn’t necessarily Each mission has at least one principal; someone who can be mean it’s time to get the dice out right away, though; it’s just directly involved in conflicts and make things nastier. They are a flag. The other factor is the opposition. Once there’s clear secrets that the referee holds until circumstances reveal them. opposition as well, then dice hit the table. They may get revised in play. For example: A conflict should emerge from player action, but if a principal Principal: agent Odessa, a Agency Handler being recruited by is involved in a conflict, win or lose, the next conflict is always house Vermeer. a retaliation and the referee sets the stage for the opposition Principal: Ricco Vermeer, son of the head of house Vermeer, to react. This is important because throughout the game who is recruiting Odessa without his father’s knowledge. the players are planning how to succeed at their objectives Once the mission has been declared players may create a with the limited resources they have, so it’s a wrench in their complication for themselves. Continuing the example: resource calculations. It may force a player to move a character Complication: I am being recruited by house Vermeer. on deliberately in order to preserve or refresh team resources (and get a death scene out of the deal). That’s fun. Once the players have shown their complications to the referee, the referee may want to revise her plans, but maybe Sometimes, shit happens to the agents rather than the other not—the Vermeer mission might be more interesting now that way around. This is best set up as the next scene, and the next there are apparently two agents being recruited! Or this might conflict—the opposition’s reaction to whatever the agents make one character “agent Odessa”: the player would then get stirred up in the first conflict. This happens with retaliation to discover that he is the target of his own investigation. after a conflict with a principal, but the ref can put pressure on the players by having the opposition stay aggressive. So A great mission starts with a clear objective and some bad surprise them—before the players can get into a pattern of people as NPCs. Not every NPC is a principal, and players need narration towards where they want the action to go, hit them people to talk to in the game world. with something. The windows shatter on their safe house. The It also starts with a team leader. So hand one member of the windscreen on the car explodes. They spot their picture in the crew a piece of paper with a terse mission description and tell newspaper on the front page. All their cell phones ring at once. her that she’s in charge of this operation. This will give the If you’re ad-libbing this stage (and that’s not unusual), start by players something to start hanging narration on right away and looking down the list of skills and pick one. That should give will also give one person the initiative to start narrating. you a hook to set the stage, by knowing that the opposition is kicking things off with DIG or TERROR or whatever. The mission statement should indicate exactly what the players are going to start talking about right off the bat, as well 66as what they are going to plan. 5.2. EXPLODING INTO ACTION As soon as the mission narration implies a conflict, go to the dice. The tip-off is that the players are starting to narrate actions relating to their skills—they are sneaking around or investigating or breaking fingers. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to get the dice out right away, though; it’s just a flag. The other factor is the opposition. Once there’s clear opposition as well, then dice hit the table. A conflict should emerge from player action, but if a principal is involved in a conflict, win or lose, the next conflict is always a retaliation and the referee sets the stage for the opposition to react. This is important because throughout the game the players are planning how to succeed at their objectives with the limited resources they have, so it’s a wrench in their resource calculations. It may force a player to move a character on deliberately in order to preserve or refresh team resources (and get a death scene out of the deal). That’s fun. Sometimes, shit happens to the agents rather than the other way around. This is best set up as the next scene, and the next conflict—the opposition’s reaction to whatever the agents stirred up in the first conflict. This happens with retaliation after a conflict with a principal, but the ref can put pressure on the players by having the opposition stay aggressive. So surprise them—before the players can get into a pattern of narration towards where they want the action to go, hit them with something. The windows shatter on their safe house. The windscreen on the car explodes. They spot their picture in the newspaper on the front page. All their cell phones ring at once. If you’re ad-libbing this stage (and that’s not unusual), start by looking down the list of skills and pick one. That should give you a hook to set the stage, by knowing that the opposition is kicking things off with DIG or TERROR or whatever. 67 5.3. MISSION BUILDING Making a mission often begins with the agency itself. Once the referee knows the charge, the enemy, and the era (as determined in “2. Agency” on page 17), the creation of an assigned mission should be a straightforward task: create some entities that have codified relationships and attributes, decide which are part of the charge and which the enemy, create a couple of principals, and the mission will often jump right out. The ref needs five pieces of information to start. The first two are developed with the creation of the agency itself providing an overview and a continuing context. The mission asks: What is the Charge? What does the players’ agency care about? The name might not matter, because what matters is its agenda. Knowing that the agency is the FBI, the Puppetmasters of Cologne, or the last untainted samurai house in Japan already starts to generate ideas. The answer to this is usually enough to determine how traits will be generated—by which of the three methods. Who is the Enemy? Whether named or not, there is some force that needs to be stopped. Like the FBI, or the Puppetmasters of Cologne, or the last untainted samurai house in Japan. Once these first two questions are answered, it is likely that the ref is also able to identify the era in which the game will be set. What are the two Objectives? It usually helps to start with the primary objective. The ref should have a sense of what the major encounter of the evening will be about. One way to do this is to look at the skill list: what specific action do you want to see played? Is it a hit (KILL)? Or a frame (CON)? Or information-gathering (DIG)? When the players have read the mission objectives and are building their teamwork pool, there should be some indication of one skill that will be called upon during the conflict. Once the primary 68objective has been written, the ref has to decide how it is to fit within the larger context of the session: is it the end of the evening (and therefore the second objective), or the midpoint (and therefore the first)? For the ref, it is usually easiest for the main objective to be (intended as) the climax, and then to decide on some preliminary step on the road towards that as the secondary objective. More exciting for the players, though, might be the sense of uncertainty entailed in answering “what happens next?”: if the primary objective is accomplished first, the follow up (or clean up) then occupies the rest of the evening. Keep in mind that whenever a character moves on the player has the opportunity to re-state one of the mission objectives. This can put a spanner in your works, but there’s a silver lining for the ref: the players will be doing it in reaction to some actual play that demands it. They won’t likely just make something up for no reason (because they aren’t required to change the mission—they just are able to do so) and so it represents a logical branch in the flow of the game that happens because of the collision between your idea and their actions. And that can only be cool. 69 Who are the Principals? Not every NPC is a principal, but Over the course of the session, the referee must regularly there should be two or three (maybe more if the group is big reassess the state of the opposition: is it aware of the agents’ enough) who are going to change the nature of the ref’s attacks. actions? How much does it care? The ref should consider It is possible that not every principal created gets used, but if any effects that the opposition has taken in the aftermath the ref has an idea who these people are they can be introduced of a player success so that the skill with which the players when convenient. Because principles split dice into two pools, have taken out the opposition in a conflict has an impact on there will be more sets when going against a principal. A the enemy’s subsequent actions. For example, if the players traitor in the midst, or the “Big Bad” that exerts a significant achieve success through KILL, then there are bodies to be measure of control over the opposition forces are both good found or disposed of. If the victory was through HURT or choices. It also makes sense to mix it up and use a principal to TERROR then, emphatically, the opponents are still alive, and cross genres, or present real unexpected surprises: the serpent have information about the agents to report back. If the victory demon that is representing France on the UN Security Council, was through DIG, then the players have information about the or the Golem the RCMP found in the Arctic ice. Introducing a enemy that they can report back to the agency, or release to principal amps up the story one way or another. the press. In any case, when the opposition has lost a conflict, the referee must deal with it based on the specific effect taken. What indelible image to you want to leave your players with? This is the hardest of the questions to answer, but sometimes this is what comes first. The ref should have an image of something really cool that she wants to share with 5.4. SAMPLE ADVENTURES the players. It might be the opening image of the evening, Here are three examples of the process, written over the against which the players will be responding: a terrorist act so course of thirty minutes each. They are offered not as pre- ruthless that a team of agents is needed. It might be the Big generated scenarios (though they can be used for that), but to Reveal at the end of the night: who really pulls the strings in demonstrate some of the thought processes that can help a House Vermeer. Or it might be a single act of violence that will referee create a mission. motivate the transition from the first objective to the second: what the body of the President looks like when its found that 5.4.1. Arena makes rescuing him impossible. Or it might just be a passing The players are going to stumble upon a modern-day image of mystery: how the silhouette of an 18th century ship gladiatorial ring where kidnapped celebrities duel each other looks when seen through the mist off two separate coastlines, to the death to the delight of criminal under-bosses. That’s the luring the agents to investigate even if it seems to have nothing Image he wants the players to discover near the end of the first to do with the mission. If the ref has an image like this, objective: finding the teenage singing celebrity in fear for her something she is excited to share, that enthusiasm will infect. life stabbing the US Vice President. From that, he extrapolates The ref may wish to customize a skill list, produce maps and the two Objectives: (a) find and rescue the Vice President; handouts, etc. But if a ref can answer these questions, it’s (b) stop those who have kidnapped him. The ref might hope usually enough to start a powerful, dynamic session. Not that the first objective will be botched: that the Vice President everything will run smoothly. Players will write complications is going to be martyred (to the story) when Alana Alabama antithetical to what the ref intends, and that is fine: that sort of impales him with her trident. But that’s not a given! 70unpredictability gives Hollowpoint its edge. Over the course of the session, the referee must regularly reassess the state of the opposition: is it aware of the agents’ actions? How much does it care? The ref should consider any effects that the opposition has taken in the aftermath of a player success so that the skill with which the players have taken out the opposition in a conflict has an impact on the enemy’s subsequent actions. For example, if the players achieve success through KILL, then there are bodies to be found or disposed of. If the victory was through HURT or TERROR then, emphatically, the opponents are still alive, and have information about the agents to report back. If the victory was through DIG, then the players have information about the enemy that they can report back to the agency, or release to the press. In any case, when the opposition has lost a conflict, the referee must deal with it based on the specific effect taken.
5.4. SAMPLE ADVENTURES Here are three examples of the process, written over the course of thirty minutes each. They are offered not as pre- generated scenarios (though they can be used for that), but to demonstrate some of the thought processes that can help a referee create a mission.
5.4.1. Arena The players are going to stumble upon a modern-day gladiatorial ring where kidnapped celebrities duel each other to the death to the delight of criminal under-bosses. That’s the Image he wants the players to discover near the end of the first objective: finding the teenage singing celebrity in fear for her life stabbing the US Vice President. From that, he extrapolates the two Objectives: (a) find and rescue the Vice President; (b) stop those who have kidnapped him. The ref might hope that the first objective will be botched: that the Vice President is going to be martyred (to the story) when Alana Alabama impales him with her trident. But that’s not a given! 71 From this, we start to have a sense of the Charge: an agency that works for the US or the UN, operating internationally and without sanctions. They’re used to killing, but this mission isn’t necessarily going to be about that. The Opposition is a gambling consortium catering to extreme criminals: let’s call it The Arena. It’s run by agent-level individuals who receive a fraction of a percent of the global crime take in exchange for a weekly video and audio feed of gladiatorial combat. The ref will need details on this: perhaps the Arena is in the belly of a Mediterranean tanker; the crew of the ship might not even know what goes on within its hull; there’s a row of a dozen cells, half of which might be filled at any time. The operation itself may be mostly automated, with a voice remotely instructing prisoners to eat, fight, or whatever, without any actual contact. And of course there are cameras, with a subscriber feed that goes through satellites and is sent globally, every Friday night. Finally, there are the Principals: let’s call them the Voice and the Hand. The Voice controls the activities on the ship, providing calm, measured instructions in a rich baritone as the wills of the prisoners are worn down. Stopping him will be the second objective. The Hand is the operative that gets the prisoners to the tanker: a master of terror that moves like a shadow, and can spirit would-be gladiators away unexpectedly. It’s not the most subtle or complex mission, granted, but is an example of what thirty-minutes’ thought can produce, and it’s certainly enough to fill an evening entertainingly. The players will start the session knowing the Vice-President has been abducted on his way to broker a Middle East peace. Investigation will eventually lead to the ship (any criminal organization they encounter will be paying the subscription for the feed) where players will discover the teen singing sensation on hiatus from her TV show stabbing the V-P. There can be some fun for the players, as other celebrities in the cells get discovered, and it is revealed that a certain action star is not in fact in rehab. 72 There isn’t much opportunity for the players to declare complications: none of them is necessarily going to become over-invested in the life of the VP. Maybe it makes more sense to give them an anticlimactic mission of rescuing the teenybopper: something so far beneath them that it doesn’t deserve their skills. But that’s something for which the players might be more willing to introduce a dirty secret. The ref might even draft an outline to describe the expected action for each objective: (a) Find and rescue the Vice-President 1. encounter with criminal organization 2. discover the Arena 3. rescue of starving trident-wielding teen sensation. At this point the players will have a choice: do they shut down the whole operation? Do they rescue others? Any violence on the ship will already have been broadcast, enriching criminal coffers. Whatever the players decide, they will eventually need to discover The Voice: (b) Stop the kidnappers 1. conflict with the Hand 2. conflict with the Voice. Each captive will have the same story to tell of their abduction; that is one route to the Hand. So are the signals from the cameras. But the exact routing of the signal presumably cannot be determined in advance. Most importantly, this is about mission-structured action, the referee needs to lay out the mission objectives clearly so that the players will know what they have to get done by the end of the session in order to have succeeded. The primary objective (if you do it, you win) as far as the players know is this: save the VP. (The referee is prepared to have this mission fail: in fact, the objective is really to discover where the VP is, but it is not phrased that way73 for the players.) The secondary objective (if you do it, you win with accolades) is: shut down the kidnappers and whoever gives them orders. The players will discover that this means “shut down the Arena”, but they have to discover the existence of the Arena first. The wording, though, points to the existence of the two principals for the players: this helps them without revealing the mystery. The secondary can be done by eliminating both the Hand and the Voice, even without the first being successful. Players will be motivated to create scenes that clearly progress towards these objectives, which limits the need for plot flow- charting on the part of the referee or, more accurately, makes these flow-charts more informative and less prescriptive.
5.4.2. Magnificent Inspiration for the ref can come from anywhere, and often it will not be obvious to the players what the source material is until well into the session. Here’s another example, the inspiration for which is from a movie we’ve all seen, and which allows a number of variations. Again, we start with a list of what’s needed: charge, enemy, objectives, principals, and an image. We can deal with these in order this time. The Charge. The agents have been hired to protect a village from raiders. The village can be in Mexico, feudal Japan, ancient Greece; anywhere. The village has no defenses of its own, but they’ve pooled what they can to hire the agency to drive back the raiders. The era in this case is immaterial though it affects the type of story that will be told. The Enemy. Since the premise is that the agents will drive back some external threat, the possibilities are wide open. It could be a natural force (ravenous wolves), a supernatural one (ravenous werewolves...), or a human one. Let’s stick with the predictable: a band of outlaws that operate nearby are terrorizing the village. They want the wealth of the village: its money, its women, the economic leverage it can exert at the fork of the river. The Mayor has lost his wife and daughter, and is inconsolable. The raiders seek complete surrender. 74 Objectives. The purpose of the mission is to stop the raiders. Let’s set up the first objective at the village, and the second at the raiders’ secret hideout in the mountains. The first objective is to discover the raiders’ base. The villagers offer nothing, and so that means waiting for a raiding party, stopping it, and following it back to its base. That means that success cannot be achieved through a KILL hit: that would mean the raiders are dead, and not able to lead them back. The second objective is to destroy the raiders permanently. Here KILL is an option, but it requires being sure that all of them are captured or destroyed. The principals need to be identified and be certain to be removed from any position of power. There are other ways the second objective could be accomplished, however: the agents could aim to draw all the bandits to the village, and stop them there. Much more innocent blood that way, but the players maintain the home field advantage. Principals. The rebel leader is the target for the second objective: he does not go on raids (usually), but has singled out this village in particular. He does not use his real name (he uses whatever the local language’s equivalent of John Smith is—an obviously generic and fake name), but does have a connection with the village: he is the brother of the Mayor. Heck, let’s pull out the clichés and make him the twin brother. The Mayor, an NPC but not a principal, may or may not know this, but Smith’s aim is to depose the Mayor (one way or another) and establish the village as his own. A second principal leads most of the raiding parties: the Crocodile always attacks with HURT: his victims stay alive, but are left in traction. The agents see the effects of his cruel brutality when they first arrive in the village. A third principal is available: Colonel Santos is a corrupt military officer who allows Smith to continue his raids. He takes a sizable cut, but in exchange ensures that there is never any official investigation. If the final conflict is against Smith and leads to his death, the retaliation will come from the military, who will have orders to surround and destroy the agents. 75 Image. Given the above, the big reveal is that Smith is the Mayor’s brother. The players work hard to discover the source of the rebel incursions, trace them to their mountain lair, where there is a carved stone throne at the head of a large wooden banquet table. The carved stone throne fits regardless of the era, evoking the warlords of history and fantasy stories. In the throne sits (as far as they can tell) the Mayor himself—the man who hired them to kill the Rebel leader. Do they hesitate, doubting their intelligence and the information they have received? (It did, they might consider, come rather easily...). An alternate image is possible if the players never go to the lair. If they find a way to draw the rebel leader down, it may be that they each have to protect one of the village’s hastily built defensive gates. Each is stationed at one gate, with the Mayor and other village leaders offering support. Smith himself attacks at the gate where his brother stands, and the two of them duel it out. The threat of brother-killing-brother at the gate of the village both seek to control, offers an alternative image that might invite the players to pick sides, or simply to stand back and watch. Since Smith is a principal, he’s not going to die unless the players intervene, leaving their own gate undefended. This setup might demand we think about skill set changes that would be appropriate. KILL, DIG, and TAKE should always be options, and we’ve identified HURT as the Crocodile’s specialty, so it should be available to players as well. Since double identities are in play, CON should be available. Given the emphasis on leadership, the ref might decide that BOSS should be a skill available (and, once he’s done so, it is clear that Smith is going to use BOSS and CON as his attacks when he’s involved in a conflict). So that’s six skills. If the ref wants, TERROR and COOL could be added to round out the choices for the players, but it’s not clear they are needed. Traits could be generated by any of the three methods. 76 5.4.3. Callisto Here’s another scenario, this time with a SF twist, inspired by the 1981 film Outland, but with an element of 1982’s Blade Runner thrown in for good measure. The setting (era) is the start of this mission: on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons, in the early twenty-second century. In the ocean that exists 100 km below the moon surface, microscopic multicellular organisms have been found. A base of several hundred scientists has been here for almost twenty years, with staff rotating on staggered two-year shifts. A series of supply ships come annually (Jupiter’s synodic period in relation to earth is just over a year, and that allows optimal efficiencies for fuel use and travel time), but the last supply run, due more than a month ago, did not come, and tensions are high as the base knows that rationing will be in effect for the next many months. With this as a starting point, the other elements emerge. Charge. The agents represent the law on Callisto, and, indeed, the law on all of Jupiter’s moons, which are less inhabited but have small mining communities. They are also clones, and appear physically different to all the scientists: they have enhanced reflexes, enhanced strength, etc. The clones are not aware of everything about their nature: they don’t know there are replacements for them if they move on. There are—they are sealed in jars in a room somewhere, ready to be activated, but that process is automated and not part of the scientists’ or the agents’ awareness. This leads also to a special rule, that the players will discover if an agent moves on: their replacement will have the same skill set and traits as the iteration that moved on. The uncertainty over the possibility of replacements should change player behavior somewhat. The agents are the law; they have no citizen rights themselves (they are owned by the Earth corporation that is funding this research station) but are the final word on legalities at the station. 77 The referee should also implement a version of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and allow the players to choose KILL in their skill set but forbid them from using it against humans. This exerts narrative pressures, because while they may still be allowed to carry weapons, they cannot use them against human opponents. Players will then be forced to describe HURT and TERROR actions, which ensure that they do not lead to human death. Rather than make it an impossibility, this makes it a prod for player creativity and imagination. Enemy. Scientists are dying. There have been four murders in the past week, the only four in the base’s history. The agents must stop the killers. The possibility that the killers are aliens should always be kept present—it’s not true, but it should be a looming possibility. Similarly, the dwindling supplies for the scientists, some of whom are overdue for shore leave, is meant to keep tensions high. Everyone is suspicious, and everyone is starting to take shortcuts to help themselves and their friends. The murders have been committed by some miners, who want to destabilize the base and discourage further research. They are seeking to assert independence from Earth, but can only do so if the corporation abandons the base from its commercial interests. 78 Principals. Tommy Lefarge is the physical trainer who monitors the health of the scientists on this low-gravity world. Since the base has many scientists deep within the moon’s surface for long periods of time, it is often he who first discovers a one is missing: they fail to show up for an appointment. Lefarge is an insurrectionist and has been working with the mining companies to destabilize the base. He will falsify reports and biometrics, using CON to throw the agents off. The leader of the mining faction is not on Callisto, but is based on Io: Hermione O’Toole sees herself as the future first president of the Jovian Moons. Her main instrument is TERROR—she does not want the facility or the access to the subsurface chambers damaged. She works from afar and will only be encountered if the players leave Callisto. There are some non-principal NPCs to meet, too. Asham Basral runs the station’s bar, The Caliph’s Eye. He is good natured, knows everybody, and runs a black market on the station. Sonja Lu is the senior corporate representative on Callisto. Some time after the completion of the first objective, she will be the fifth murder victim. Imogen Starkie is the geomorphologist who monitors the integrity of the shafts down to the ocean. “Thor” Thorvaldson is the chief electrician and engineer. His son, one of the few children on the moons, was the first murder victim. The mining faction also has a troop of clones that can be deployed on short notice (and against a clone, the agents can use KILL!). The clones are not in the base but outside, hiding at an outpost on the edge of the underground sea. Objectives. (1) Find who is responsible for the murders, and (2) stop them. Sympathizers with the mining faction are everywhere, and the players should be regularly challenged to go to the dice. Their problem is that there are too many suspects and red herrings: the black market, the shortages, the multi-cellular life (“space plankton”, some of the scientists have started calling it). Stopping the miners does not require capturing or killing O’Toole, but it does mean removing the presence of any insurrectionists from the base79 on Callisto. Image. The first time the agents show up at the subsurface ocean, the chamber can be described. Having left the cold, antiseptic corridors at the surface that are composed entirely 5.5. PACING of identical prefabricated modules, and having descended on the rickety elevator (that is electric with a manual override) One of the biggest challenges for the ref is modulating the for several hours, observing the stratigraphy as they descend, session to ensure missions get done and fun is had. feeling the cold and the dank through their suits (which are A scene with a conflict takes about twenty minutes. That, required for scientists whenever they leave the base), the combined with character generation and transition scenes, chamber they enter is filled with an eerie glow: the Callistan means that a typical session will involve four or five conflicts. life is bioluminescent. The violet hue fills the low roofed Too many conflicts in a session and the escalation gets beyond chamber that extends for miles in each direction as the salty the players and their ever-dwindling teamwork pool, so and ammonia-filled water churns under the pressures of expect two conflicts per objective. If one of those involves a Jupiter’s gravity. A conflict here can involve splashing, pontoon principal, the retaliation will make three. Now players may boats, and subterranean explosions as the miners continue very well find their own conflicts along the way and sometimes with their terrorism. this shortcuts the mission objectives, allowing them to be Given the limits on KILL for the players, they should be accomplished faster than the ref expects. Sometimes it is allowed the standard skill deployment as well as HURT. They needless conflict and slows the plot progression. can choose to take KILL but it must be made clear that they Players should be allowed to make these choices, but it is up to can’t use it against humans. Players should be encouraged the ref to ensure that everyone is participating, and everyone to be creative in their narration, and use the setting (low is on-board with the plan. That’s one of the consequences of gravity, oxygen tanks, spacesuits, etc.) aggressively in their enforced teamwork. contributions to the story. Traits can be generated using method 2 (“3.4.2. Traits On the Fly” on page 28), or method Keep the band together, if you can. This might involve 1 (“3.4.1. Traits by Q and A” on page 27) with the following starting a new scene by turning to another player, and asking, five questions: “Okay, while Chris is punching innocent drunks down at the docks, what are you doing?” Switching focus is crucial, to • How do people looking at you know you are a clone? ensure all are participating. During a conflict, you can just go • What human object do you keep secretly? around the table to ensure everyone has a chance to narrate something in a given round’s action. Exactly how this is • What childhood event do you remember even though it accomplished, though, depends on the dynamics of the table. never happened? Adult diapers. What motivates players is not always • What special equipment do you have to help you do your obvious, but part of the ref’s responsibility in terms of job? maintaining the pace of the session is to push the players into • With what enhanced skills have you been programmed? interesting areas. Sometimes player choices appear irrational in terms of game mechanics: they should move on, but want to persist doggedly with their character, even though it means repeated failures. 80 5.5. PACING One of the biggest challenges for the ref is modulating the session to ensure missions get done and fun is had. A scene with a conflict takes about twenty minutes. That, combined with character generation and transition scenes, means that a typical session will involve four or five conflicts. Too many conflicts in a session and the escalation gets beyond the players and their ever-dwindling teamwork pool, so expect two conflicts per objective. If one of those involves a principal, the retaliation will make three. Now players may very well find their own conflicts along the way and sometimes this shortcuts the mission objectives, allowing them to be accomplished faster than the ref expects. Sometimes it is needless conflict and slows the plot progression. Players should be allowed to make these choices, but it is up to the ref to ensure that everyone is participating, and everyone is on-board with the plan. That’s one of the consequences of enforced teamwork. Keep the band together, if you can. This might involve starting a new scene by turning to another player, and asking, “Okay, while Chris is punching innocent drunks down at the docks, what are you doing?” Switching focus is crucial, to ensure all are participating. During a conflict, you can just go around the table to ensure everyone has a chance to narrate something in a given round’s action. Exactly how this is accomplished, though, depends on the dynamics of the table. Adult diapers. What motivates players is not always obvious, but part of the ref’s responsibility in terms of maintaining the pace of the session is to push the players into interesting areas. Sometimes player choices appear irrational in terms of game mechanics: they should move on, but want to persist doggedly with their character, even though it means repeated failures. 81 Offer incentives within the story. Gushing praise from an attractive NPC can have a surprisingly positive effect. Inventing someone just to say how badass the agent is and buy them a drink can offer psychological reinforcement for the player. Conversely, presenting the need for the character to wear adult diapers as an undesired alternative can push some players towards actions they otherwise might not consider, simply because the phrase “adult diapers” has been established as the worst that can happen to a shit-hot ultra-cool killing action hero. Coda. If everything seems wrapped up but there is still half an hour left and everyone wants to play, add a final coda: a scene with a conflict that provides narrative completion or closural depth. Think of James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the allergy clinic is destroyed, and Bond is about to move on by marrying Tracy. He has given that terrible, awkward wave to Moneypenny, proving convincingly that marriage will remove any suave, cool sophistication Bond ever had. But as they are driving away Blofeld makes one final, desperate attack. The result denies Bond happiness, but it also means that he doesn’t move on (“James Bond will return...”). This final attack radically changes the outcome of the story. Example: While completing a Mission’s first objective, Jonah has his character Telluride move on when it was revealed that he had been corrupted and was selling agent identities to the De Falco Syndicate. The next character was an Operative, who got things done, and by the end of the session, as ordered, the De Falco Syndicate was dismantled. If there is time, though, it might be worth going back, and allowing the current Team to execute Telluride. No loose ends, right? A coda is an opportunity to spotlight someone, turning a success tragic or putting a twist on a relationship that the players think they figured out. It can happen to a completely different character: it might even concern an agent that has moved on. Sometimes a coda might be forced on the players, if the final conflict had been against a principal (as it often is), though of course the table can always just decide that things 82are done and crack open the scotch. Since the Beginning, we have been at war. Both sides receive orders from a source that is omniscient and inscrutable, and so we fight. For a long time we fought with silver swords, but in seventy-ninth century since the Beginning there was great innovation, and guns proved superior. So we adapt to our Appendixnew environments. It is ordained that we do so: whatever we may think, or feel, free choice is simply not in our nature. We walk among them, and when they notice us they see what they want to see: people like themselves, usually, though some see us as monsters, people who can change into beasts. If our side has little crosses on our bullets, carved into the silver tip with our indestructible thumbnails, well, that’s just a symbol, a way of showing team loyalty. If I had doubts about the Plan, if I could have doubts, I would wonder what purpose any of the conflict can serve. We can’t die–angels retire when the Story would have us retire. But it’s wrong that we don’t feel pain. My vocation is to hurt the enemy. I do it well, and will continue to do it until I retire. Life hurts, and I am an instrument of its pain.
Appendix: Stories
To give a sense of how a session might go, here are a couple of overviews from Hollowpoint playtests, played with a ref and three players. Smaller, narration-only scenes are omitted to help maintain clarity.
A.1. ENZO’S AMBITION In this session the players accomplish both their stated objectives in four scenes of conflict, one of which is retaliation. Three scenes represent a success for the players, but two player characters have to move on before the job is done. This scenario is a very basic Agency tale: agents are sent to manage mis-behaving criminal families and keep order amongst the rich, powerful, and evil. 83 Objectives. The agents are called and told to discover what Enzo Medici is planning against his own family. If he’s working with the Gonzales family, retribution will be required. So, the stated objectives are (1) investigate Enzo Medici, and (2) punish Enzo and whoever he works for. The ref has two principals, Enzo Medici and Old Gonzales, but the players don’t know this. Gonzales is the head of a rival house, and has a daughter, Angela, who is not a principal. The ref also decides to modify the skill list slightly: COOL is not a skill (all agents ave cool oozing out of their pores anyway), but WATCH is. So there’s still six skills available. As it turns out, one agent, Amy, uses WATCH to powerful effect. First Conflict: Check out Enzo. The three agents (Yuri, Ed, and Amy) begin by trying to find out whether or not Enzo intends to kill his father and take over the family. They head to Chicago and stir up shit: players make rolls on TERROR, KILL, and TAKE. No DIG, despite the purpose of the stated objective. The ref takes ten dice (4x2 for the players, +2 for a Principal; the pool is split into two groups, five and five). Round 1. Yuri, Ed, and Amy get in the car and drive from Mississauga to check out what exactly is happening in Chicago after being asked to investigate chicanery inside the Medici and Gonzales households. Ed hits the bars in Chicago looking to harass friends of Enzo Medici, while Yuri sets up with a sniper rifle across the street at each stop. Amy, meanwhile, is pushing the bits and looking for facts in the Medici family computer system. Ed tries to enlist Yuri’s help by staking out one of Enzo’s favourite clubs in a purely observational role for a couple of days non-stop. That means adult diapers, though, and Yuri is not interested. He says, “Fuck That” and Ed’s player chooses not to hit the teamwork pool. Meanwhile Amy’s investigation goes sour as she finds someone is downloading data from her laptop. She dumps it and flees. Ed enters the bar and discovers Enzo. They chat. Enzo says the whole thing is his father’s game—dad is setting him up to be killed by the Agency. Enzo offers Ed a fat wad of cash, which Ed takes. 84 The player decides to have Ed move on—he’s an enemy agent working for Enzo now—and so we lose his perspective. Round 2. So now we see Yuri, rifle over a window-sill, with his souvenir from Utah, a ceramic hula girl. Through his scope he sees Enzo and Ed get friendly and then some money changes hands. Then he sees Enzo give Ed a handgun and Yuri knows Ed has been turned. He opens fire, killing Enzo, Ed, and people they don’t even know. As his rifle bucks on full auto, we pan briefly to his grin behind the scope and then back to the hula girl which, falls to the street and shatters. Pan up to the wrecked bar, the screaming and the sirens. Fade to black. Result: Yuri has been asked to help but has said Fuck That. The computer is fucked up, Enzo is dead, one agent is turned and then killed in the crossfire. It’s a success for the players, and the first objective is accomplished. Next Scene. We are in a wrecked and overgrown lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Distant music is playing. In the foreground, Yuri and Amy are trying to figure out how to proceed, when a black Mercedes pulls up and Joel (an Operative, worked by the same player who had played Ed) steps out. More dice fall into the Teamwork pool. Joel demands to know how things got so fucked up and explains how they are going to improve. He tells them they are heading to Vegas by private plane. Second Conflict, a retaliation: Enzo was a Principal, and so there is a retaliation. Arriving in Vegas: Angela Gonzales takes revenge for the killing of Enzo and hires an ambush on the agents’ car. The ref gets ten dice again (4x2 for the players, +2 for the last success). The Lear jet touches down in Vegas on a side strip with a tumbleweed shooting by. Winds are high, as are teenagers in the parking lot, and the sun in the sky. The agents debark and walk to their car, right by the strip, ready for them, and ride into town. As they head down the strip, Yuri gets a call. “Go ahead.” “Fuck you, Yuri.” Yuri looks back at Amy in the back seat who shrugs. 85 Then the windshield explodes. Action: Yuri helps by getting out of the way. Amy calls out targets over Yuri’s head (WATCH). Joel rains death (KILL). Amy shouts at Yuri. “Get the fuck down out of the way!” Joel, driving, draws his weapon and opens fire out the ruined windshield. The car fishtails and Yuri dives down to the floor in the passenger seat, laughing. “Call out targets, Amy!” shouts Joel, as his cigarette falls from his lips. Amy starts shouting precise instructions over the sounds of smashing steel, bullet impacts, yelling, and gunfire. She pauses once when a bullet rips through Yuri’s seat and into her arm. Bullets slap through door handles, the hood, a side mirror, the steering wheel, as Joel calmly picks off the attackers. The car skids and slows, coming to a stop against a lamp post. A bullet tears through Joel’s jacket pocket, smashing his expensive lighter (that he got that one time in Utah) in a quiet little flash of igniting butane. Soon enough everything stops. The car, the gunfire, and the breathing of six hired thugs half a block away. Yuri is still laughing from the floor of the car, and Joel lets out a snort as well, his badass facade broken for a moment. “I’m okay, guys,” says Amy from the back seat. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.” Yuri laughs again. “Man, your car is fucked, Joel.” Result: Dead ambushers, and Amy is shot but will be okay. Only two players are rolling dice because the third chooses not to be part of the conflict. Success for the players. Third Conflict: Go kill Angela. The agents decide to kill Angela Gonzales at her home. Action: Joel and Yuri KILL. Amy calls Old Gonzales to negotiate, using her CON. The ref takes twelve dice (4x2 for the players, +4 since there have been two successes already). 86 Obviously we can’t have the daughters of powerful men trying to kill agents, even if those agents did drop a mag of 7.62 into her boyfriend. Hell, a lot of other people died in that bar too, and none of their girlfriends shot up anyone’s car. So the agents decide to pay a visit to the Gonzales mansion outside Las Vegas and kill little Angela. Joel and Yuri head to the estate with guns ready while Amy gets on the phone to Angela’s father. Joel tells Yuri to cover him while he tries to break into the main house. Yuri pops up from behind a hedge and some elegant statuary and starts picking off well-dressed guards carrying sub-machineguns. Joel heads in the back door amidst the yelling and the smashing. “This is Gonzales. How can I help you?” Amy says, “Gonzales. I hear gunfire. Is everything okay?” Old Gonzales coughs. “You tell me.” Joel’s making no progress and Yuri is getting impatient. “Joel, how about YOU cover ME? And I just kill everything?” Joel nods. Yuri grins and walks out into the open, helped by Joel, and calmly picks off targets who are now under fire from two angles. Until the slides on his twin Sig pistols both lock open at the same time and the guards gather their wits. Yuri goes down, bleeding out, under a hail of gunfire and Joel bolts for the car. “Amy, you still there? You’re in trouble, girl. Oh, and someone wants to talk to you.” “What the fuck, Gonzales? You and your daughter are both going down, now!” A new voice comes on the line. “Hello Amy, this is Medici. The elder. You are in in way over your head, girl.” Amy drops the phone and, without another word, gets into Old Gonzales’s car. She hot-wires it and zooms off into the desert night and away from the gun toting adrenaline jobs of Joel and Yuri. She is never heard from again. Rumour has it she now runs a greasy spoon near Barstow. 87 Result: While Joel’s trying to get in, Yuri is shooting guards but overplays his hand, leaping from cover with an empty mag. He’s shot down and “bleeding out”, but he will recover because the player isn’t ready to move him on. In the meantime, Amy discovers that Gonzales and Medici are working together and so she is screwed. She gets in the car and flees, moving on. Failure for the players. Moving On. Amy’s player writes up Betty, and she throws some dice into the Teamwork pool. Fourth Conflict: Hurting Gonzales. Shutting down the Gonzales casino: Betty shows up and explains that they are going to hurt Gonzales by destroying his casino interest. Action: Joel DIGS while Betty and Yuri use TERROR on the big Fish that’s set up to finance Gonzales’ Big Deal. Twelve dice for the ref (4x2 for the players, and still only two successes). Round 1. It’s a wash. With no successful hits on the dice, everything goes sour. Joel becomes a person of interest—his investigation turns on him and the Casino calls the cops. Betty’s assisted TERROR roll went weird on them and the Fish turned out to be conning Old Gonzales. Yuri was helping Betty, so he’s bulletproof. The Casino has three hits on it—it’s in the newspapers, it’s hesitant, and it’s paying too much (an ad hoc first stage effect from a CON hit). Round 2. Betty switches to DIG, trying to leverage in the newspapers and expose the Gonzales’ shell game. Yuri enlists Joel’s help as he continues to use TERROR on the Fish. Result: Casino goes under when the Fish is exposed. Gonzales is screwed and Medici, disgusted, lets him twist. Success for the players. Recap. The players had been given two objectives, and in the end both were accomplished. The route taken was mostly at the players’ devising, however: • Conflict 1: a non-standard investigation leads to success. Objective achieved; one player moves on. 88 • Conflict 2: retaliation since the first conflict involved a principal. • Conflict 3: players respond to the retaliation, and hit Angela Gonzales. No objectives involved; one player moves on. Failure. • Conflict 4: it’s not possible to punish Enzo (he’s dead, and so free from suffering), but the second objective is still not met. The hit on the Gonzales casino will accomplish the second objective, though. Player success. We only meet Old Gonzales over a phone line, and so his character never adds the principal dice. Obviously, the ref could have made his daughter Angela a principal on the fly, but that wasn’t necessary and would have then required another retaliation scene. The same is true of the Fish: he is introduced as someone who Old Gonzales is setting up a deal with, but he’s an outsider, and not part of this story. House Medici has accomplished its goals: the treacherous Enzo has been uprooted, and there will be no alliance with house Gonzales. Old Gonzales is damaged, but not ruined, and the family has lost its casino. The balance between Chicago and Vegas is re-asserted, and the agents can make their way back to Southwestern Ontario.
89
A.2. BEHOLD A NEW CREATION Player characters are angels hunting down the Fallen—angels and other immortals that were on the wrong side in the war on Heaven. They dress like humans but they are unbearably cool and can manifest wings when they like. They are uninterested in humans. Mission: A fabrication has been detected—a constructed being. It is immortal and it is assumed that the fabricator is one of the Fallen: the angels are instructed (1) to find out who is making things and (2) to neutralize them. The ref has four principals ready, but the players are only going to meet two of them, Laeos and Hite. We use standard skills, but the concept of Angels as agents presumes KILL and COOL are the focus. Initial Scene: Not a conflict, but the players want to find a place to start, and so one character makes a skill check, rolling a skill and seeing if a set is made. One player’s angel has 4 dice in DIG, and rolls that. There’s no set, so he burns a trait, which gives him two more dice. When they are rolled, a set is made, and the players have a lead. With this success, they also circumvent a big part of what the ref has planned, but everyone just rolls with it. Who knows where this will take them. First Conflict: 12 dice (four players this time, plus the ref: 5x2, plus two for the successful skill check). The team arrives in Las Vegas, Nevada (where would you start a search for a source of Evil in this world?) and enters the residence of a small outpost of the Host—agents lesser than full angels, but who are also involved in hunting the Fallen. They live in the penthouse suite of the MGM Grand. They are hiding something and the conflict is to determine what. The team wins the conflict (with DIG, the investigation skill) although one angel is also shot in the process. We discover that the outpost knows not only where the creation is but who made it—a fallen angel named Hite. 90 Second Conflict: 16 dice (5x2 for the players, plus four for two successes on the skill check and the first conflict, and two more for a principal). The creation, Laeos, is a principal and the pool is split, ten and four. Laeos is of indeterminate sex and appears to be made from strips of old clothes binding shards of glass and steel. The cloth strips each bear a unique name and many are familiar—all are angels. Laeos is loathe to surrender the location of Hite and so our angels begin the persuasion. Ultimately COOL hits mean that Laeos is awed by their beauty and her ugliness and so she gives up that Hite is in the Nevada desert, but not before she rips one angel’s heart out. The player chooses to move on and a complication is revealed by the player indicating that Laeos is not actually an immortal—she has a soul, and in fact it is the soul of a mortal woman that the angel once loved. The hesitation at this recognition cost him his manifestation. 91 Dressing down: The player whose angel moved on brings in an archangel who is kind of soft on the team who just got a pal killed, but gives the instructions—no more dallying in the wilderness. It’s time to head to civilization (if Vegas can be considered civilization) and remove Hite once and for all. Zoom! Third Conflict: 16 dice (5x2 for the players, plus six because of three previous successes). This scene is a retaliation, because of the principal in the last conflict). En route the team is ambushed by the group of Fallen that run operations in Las Vegas. The Fallen forces are organized and think the team is after them (they’re not). They are also over-confident and blow most of their dice in a huge 6-wide set, which leads to another player success. The Fallen forces feel fear (TERROR), and the demons are now fleeing Vegas. Fourth Conflict: 20 dice (5x2 for the players, plus eight for four previous successes and two more dice because a principal is involved). The dice are split evenly (ten and ten). Our heroes have Hite come down to a poker room in the Sahara casino where he is interrogated. Hite arrives with a friend, Arman— another angel who wears a suit made from souls. Arman appears to be quietly insane. Hite is less quiet. In the process of assessing the situation, Arman is shot, damaging his suit, and one of the angels rips Hite’s wings off. The table agrees that this does not resolve the mission, but it is a success and so we move immediately to a reaction from Arman. Fifth Conflict: 20 dice (5x2 for the players, plus ten for five previous successes). Arman lays out his argument for the Fall. He describes the necessity of free will. He is convincing. He notes that you cannot be judged without free will and you want to be judged. You crave legitimate judgment, in fact: that is the only way that one can be assured of Supreme approval, of some external validation for any and every thing one has ever done. The teamwork pool is pretty empty at this point, and so the players respond to Arman’s transcendent theologic with their strongest skills. And so guns blaze, wings flourish, and, despite 92 a large number of sets on both sides, Arman is defeated. Hite’s bleeding body is taken forcibly from Arman to be destroyed by the Radiance itself. We note, however, that the window is open and one angel is missing, having moved on. He has made a free choice. Arman smiles.
93 94 Field Guide Memorandum To: All field operatives From: Number Seven Re: Operational information The following pages are intended as a field guide for new agents. Many of you are already familiar with this material. Those of you who are not will want to make yourself aware of the weapons and tactics at your disposal. Even if they don’t suit your particular idiom, your opponents will not be shy about knifing you, shooting you, or blowing you to pieces with grenades. There will be no exam. I leave you with some words to live by:
“I suspect that, unofficially at least, the image of a degraded enemy is essential to the psychology of any robustly homicidal combat team” (Gault 1971: 451). “Trust, decency, restraint, and gentleness are of little use in the face of relentless pressure to kill or be killed. In such an atmosphere, the man of blunted sensibilities and ready violence, unburdened by empathy or compassion and seeing others merely as objects; the man of restless, aggressively stimulus-seeking disposition; the enthusiastic advocate of wanton destruction—in short, the psychopath—finds himself at last in a world suited to his character” (Gault 1971: 452). 95 Personal Weapons It has come to our attention that many field agents are using their own weaponry rather than the provided service pistol. While we recognize that often an agent must improvise, the selection of the .40 calibre hollowpoint ammunition in your service pistol was arrived at scientifically. The lighter .22 and .25 calibre ammunition some of you prefer for assassination is indeed well- suited to executions, but the bulk of your work will be at greater distances, and the .40 will still serve admirably in the execution context. The massive .50 AE ammunition that you Desert Eagle fanatics use is simply ridiculous—yes, it will penetrate enormous amounts of intervening obstacle (cars, bricks, trees, other people) but the recoil and the noise make it a poor trade for simple damage. The .38 is adequate but really you are just clinging to tradition when you bring that old police service revolver to a mission. The .40 does everything it does but better, and the autoloader is much handier than that fat revolver. Finally, those of you who carry a 10mm are displaying far too close a commitment to your old job in the FBI. Let’s face it, it’s practically the same load but in metric. Unless you’re pretending to be an FBI agent, the difference is uninteresting, so just stick with the company firearm please. Finally, no one watches Dirty Harry any more. The .44 magnum is completely unnecessary. 96 Grenades Grenades are tetchy business—you’re going to throw a high- explosive device, after all. Remember all those bad bounces when throwing a baseball? Remember dropping it, slipping with it, fumbling it? With a grenade, you’re now probably dead. Not a huge margin for error with a grenade. On the upside, as the saying implies, you don’t have to get one all that close to your opponents in order to cause them a great deal of hurt. Grenades are simple. They are little bombs—a steel case (or sometimes a lighter case with an internal layer of steel wire or a notched steel sheath) with striker held under spring tension, a fusing material that ignites under percussion, and some high explosive. A pin with a ring attached to it holds a lever in place and the lever holds the striker up against the spring tension. So, you pull the pin and now the only thing holding the lever on (the “spoon” sometimes it’s called) is your grip on the whole assembly. When you throw it, the lever springs away and the striker is released, traveling down under spring tension until it strikes the fusing material. In older grenades, this could be a percussion cap and a column of black powder. In some modern grenades it’s a glass capsule with a chemical in it that eats through a material until it reaches an ignition material that reacts violently enough with the chemical to set of the high explosive. Sometimes it’s a pair of chemicals that mix when the capsule is ruptured and, when mixed, slowly heat up until they are energetic enough to set off the high explosive. At any rate, some time-delayed fuse is started that takes a well known amount of time to set of the high explosive. When the HE goes off, the steel casing is ruptured into thousands of tiny shards, propelled outward at speeds usually exceeding that of a bullet. Hilarity and bleeding ensue. There’s lots of ways a grenade can go wrong—the fuse could be short or long, the capsule could rupture in handling, the fuse might be a dud, the pin could get pulled out by a tree branch, and on and on. But the most common way they go wrong is the thrower doesn’t get behind some cover but instead wants to watch. 97 Shotguns Shotguns are great fun. They are simple, cheap, reliable, make an enormous amount of noise, take a wide variety of loads, don’t get a second glance anywhere a gun rack is common, and are scary as hell from the wrong side. Just hearing the action on a pump gun cycle is enough to get compliance from practically anyone. If you saw the end off it you can hide it under a big coat or in a gym bag. You can’t saw a pump-gun down very far (only as far as the pump, basically) but a nice simple double-barrel will go down to the size of a very fat pistol. You’re only sawing it off to get some surprise in your gig anyway, so having two shots before going to knife or pistol is not a big deal. It’s a focused decision, let’s say. Part of a plan. Your shotgun can come in a range of bore sizes. All of them are smooth as opposed to rifling of a rifle, and that means what comes out is not stabilized in any interesting way. That means your accurate range is pretty short. The bore size determines how much of what can come out the dangerous end. The .410 is a fun boy’s-first-boomstick but not for serious work. The bore is about the size of a .45 pistol round (and in fact most .45 revolvers can fire .410 shotgun cartridges, but check your owner’s manual before listening to me) and are good for dumping a fair charge of birdshot downrange. You can hurt someone with this but it’s a weapon you’d find not a weapon you’d choose. Anything bigger is referenced by “gauge” and the smaller the number the bigger the bore. The term gauge comes from cannons and it’s the mass of a ball of lead that fits the barrel of the shotgun. So a 1/12 pound lead ball fits snugly in a 12 gauge bore. You’ll find 28, 20, 16, and weirder gauge shotguns, but there are two you might buy on purpose for a job. The 12 gauge is the household shotgun. If you say, “shotgun”, it’s the 12 that you’ll send an image of. The hole on the bad end is almost 3/4 of an inch across. There are a million kinds of ammunition for this bore size and there are “magnum” variants with bigger charges behind them for more boom. The 10 gauge is a much heftier weapon and rarely found in anything other than double or single shot forms. They are handy for killing rhinos, but they also kick up a shitstorm on vehicles, buildings, and armoured bad guys. The range of ammunition you can get is a little narrower (and a little harder to find) but still fun. 98 In addition to picking a size, you also need to select an action. Single and double-barreled shotguns usually are single action—you thumb back the hammer, pull the trigger (or triggers) and BOOM you’re empty. Pump shotguns have a sliding grip below the barrel that ejects the spent cartridge and loads a new one when you slide it back and forth. They hold between three and seven or so cartridges. Semi-autos (autoloaders to some folks) use recoil or gas pressure to automatically eject the spent cartridge and load a new one. These are fast to empty, which can be pretty handy. They can be finicky too, though—the shape of the average shotgun load is not really well-suited to that kind of precise mechanical operation. There are some fully-automatic shotguns out there the are basically machineguns with shotgun loads. These are not very practical weapons, but you can create a lot of havoc and confusion with one. Finally you have to pick your ammunition. The fattest, heaviest load is a single grooved “deer slug”, which is one big fat cylinder of lead grooved in a spiral so that it will spin as it comes out of the barrel, giving it some stability. It arrives on target with enormous energy and is scary as hell. Generally, though, you’ll get a cartridge that’s loaded with “shot”—steel or lead spheres behind a little plastic or paper cap called the “shot cup”. This ranges from bird shot, which will sting like hell and bleed a lot but not really penetrate at any interesting range, to triple-ought, which is a small cluster of balls about the same size as some handgun ammunition. The bigger the shot the more penetration it will have but the narrower the spread will be, and part of the reason you chose a shotgun is that the unstable projectiles tend to fan out a bit at range, increasing your chance of at least one hit. So you will develop a taste for the cartridge that best suits your style. Then there are specialty rounds and they do practically anything you can dream of. Explosive, illuminating, smoke-generating, laser- guided, shrieking, or flame-throwing cartridges are all popular. If you can make up a function for a shotgun projectile over your sixth beer with pals, odds are someone will sell it to you before you can sober up. 99 Cons Confidence games are means of getting something the con artist wants and the mark is unwilling to provide (usually money or information). Cons work because the mark is emotionally invested: fear, greed, or even benevolence. Cons work not because the mark trusts the con artist, but because the con artist appears to trust the mark. Short cons are defined by a single contact with the mark. Long cons require repeated contacts: they provide opportunities for a bigger haul, but carry greater risk. The best short cons are those where the mark does not know he has been taken. In the Honey Trap (or Badger Game), a man is caught in a compromising position, and then is allowed to pay to keep it quiet. The situation need not be sexual or illegal, if the mark has some cultural or religious vice he wishes to remain secret. One payment (as much as the mark can stand) and life goes on: the mark is happy to stay silent for fear of outing himself. Variations include the promise of easy money at an illegal card game where all of the other players are in on the con, or the Three Card Monte where the dealer and the shills convince the mark that winning is possible. Subsequent contacts with the mark in other contexts are possible. With the Pigeon Drop, the mark soon discovers they have been duped: repeated contacts with the mark are not possible. The mark is asked to invest for long-term gains: buying a lottery ticket or an uncashable paycheck from an illegal immigrant. Variations include the Fiddle Game, where an object is ascribed a false inflated value by an apparent third party, preying on the greed of the mark to dupe the apparent owner of the object, and the Thai Gem scam, where marks are duped into large quick purchases of falsely appraised objects. Long cons offer an object to be rescued, ransomed, or bought with multiple payments. Characteristic is the Spanish Prisoner, in which the con artist offers the mark a large payout but requires multiple, small payments to accomplish this. The con may prey on greed or benevolence, or a mixture of the two. The Nigerian bank scams (aka 419 Fraud) work the same way: money is extracted by a sympathetic victim for bribes, etc., with the promise of a large payout. The unstable growth of pyramid schemes requires multiple marks and long exposure, and are not practicable for agents. Keep your eye on the prize, and engage the mark’s emotions. Cons succeed because they don’t look like cons. Marks are hit because they think they are smarter than they are. 100 The Fight There are many weapons with varying degrees of effectiveness under different circumstances, but there is one thing that is the solution to every fight: aggression. The trained professional knows her objective and if the objective is satisfied by leaving, she leaves. If it means staying, then she advances on her objective wielding violence as necessary, achieves her objective, and then leaves. This requires a lot of simple aggression. The key here is that you will need to advance into danger. If you sit still, you will be surrounded and killed. Nothing will save you if you stay in one place, no matter how good a position you have. Staying still is just practice for being dead. And besides, your objective is not where you are, even if you are in a defensive role: your objective is out there. Either it’s a thing you need to take or a person you need to kill or a place you need to be. If your objective is to hold ground, then your REAL objective is to get rid of everyone who is trying to prevent that. And that means aggression: advance and kill. People hate that. Serious aggression is constant steady motion towards the objective coupled with sustained accurate fire. Your opponent sees you approaching remorselessly and killing his friends. He sees you not scared. He sees you not running away or hiding. You are using cover as it becomes available, but only to send out high volumes of fire to make it safe for your friend to sneak around the enemy’s cover. Or to duck behind while you reload, because sometimes you have to reload. When you get shot you keep moving. Even if you are shot dead, you should still be moving towards your target. You can fall lifeless on your objective, your enemy fled or mortally wounded, and you still win. You never stop and you never hesitate. Every move towards the objective. Every shot to kill. 101 Knives Most people carry weapons to discourage other people attacking them. If you pull out a knife, you have chosen to escalate the conflict and threaten the use of deadly force. In the United States, that means your opponent now may shoot you in self-defense. If you are going to use a knife instead of a firearm (because you want the quiet, or because you like being close), you are not looking to avoid conflict, or keep a lid on escalating violence. You have amped it up as high as it can go and done so with suboptimal weaponry. Your obligation now is to kill. Quickly, and preferably before your opponent has a chance to defend himself. The faster the better: if your opponent is bleeding from three or four stab wounds before they know a fight has started, you might survive this time. But only this time. Avoid getting cut, at all costs, because that’s just one step this side of being dead. There are no fair duels, no rules in a knife fight. If your opponent is not down in the first ten seconds after you have drawn your knife, you have failed. Get the fuck out. If you don’t you’ll both be bleeding everywhere and someone smarter than you will shoot you. If you know you control the room, a knife can torture an innocent effectively, and leave brutal scars. A guy with a knife can take you. You may think you’re the shit at unarmed combat, but your hand can’t make multiple four-inch chest wounds inside of seconds. If someone draws a knife on you, shoot him and carry on with your job. 102 Pistols Pistols are lousy weapons. They do less harm than a longarm like a rifle or a shotgun, they are inaccurate, they are clumsy, they are prone to failure, they are often highly illegal, and they are expensive. They are, however, scary and fun and they are about the best weapon you can hide under a suit jacket all day. A well-made pistol designed for fighting (rather than desperation) and wielded by a well-trained individual will hit targets out past a hundred feet all day. In combat, however, they won’t hit shit because your enemy is moving, shooting back, and human. Most people (not agents, usually) don’t really want to hurt anyone and generally won’t—they’ll shoot high or not at all, hoping to scare the bad guy off. Usually this will be effective—guns work in part because they are loud and scary. Once you get going and scared, you’ll probably shoot all your ammunition really fast without watching where you’re shooting (and if it’s dark—and dammit it always seems to be dark when the shit goes down—now your night vision is blown so you’re blind). So now you’re out of ammunition as well as scared, maybe blind, and odds are the bad guy is fine. Again, most of the time he’s also gone, so that’s okay. So the pro learns several things. Get close, shoot to kill, and shoot two or three times then pause and assess. Also, ignore the other guy—odds are he doesn’t want to hurt you so he’s not actually shooting at you. 103 Ammunition The single most important element determining the effectiveness of a firearm is its ammunition. There are several factors. Mass. Kinetic Energy is one half of mass times velocity squared. Momentum is mass times velocity, and momentum determines things like stopping power. The mass of a bullet is usually measured in “grains” but the precise mass is not so important— when someone talks about a “178 grain hollowpoint” they are talking about a specific cartridge with various characteristics as well as the mass. Velocity. The velocity of a bullet is a huge factor in the kinetic energy it applies to a target, but it’s also a big factor in penetration, and a bullet that passes through its target wastes energy. The perfect bullet uses all its energy inside the target. Velocity is a factor of the charge in the cartridge (how much powder) and how long the barrel of the weapon is (which determines the period of time over which the pressure from the charge is applied to the bulled). Rifles use very high velocity bullets to achieve great range and penetration, causing enormous harm. Handguns and sub- machineguns use lower velocity ammunition (compensating with higher mass bullets) to reduce recoil and cause “enough” damage. Composition and form. Bullets come in many shapes, designed for different purposes. The most common is a steel or copper jacketed lead bullet designed to keep its shape through impact with minor obstacles but still fragment or otherwise deform against the target, increasing the amount of KE spent. Some have a cavity at the tip (a hollow point) or other mechanism to cause them to expand on impact, again to increase the KE spent on target. This hollowpoint design is a refinement of the “dum dum” bullet of yesteryear, which can be accomplished with a plain lead bullet and a knife to incise a cross in the tip. 104 There are a few special kinds of ammunition that you should be aware of. Glaser. The Glaser round is a hard gelatin bullet packed with shot. It is designed to expend all energy on the first thing it hits, causing enormous damage to a relatively short depth. It kills or maims people, but will not pass through a wall with sufficient force to kill. It is out of favour as its penetration against leather and denim is questionable. Subsonic. Most ammunition has a velocity exceeding the speed of sound, causing a sonic boom in addition to the sound of the weapon discharge. In weapons that actively suppress noise, therefore, a bullet that travels below the speed of sound is desirable. This ammunition has low penetration and so often used by field marshals in commercial aircraft, but it is still more than sufficient to cause lethal damage against unarmoured targets. Tracer. Weapons that discharge large amounts of ammunition in short order at long range can be difficult to aim once they get going. Tracer ammunition is tipped with an incendiary compound that ignites from barrel friction, creating a streak of illumination. These bullets are inferior to regular ammunition for inflicting harm and consequently are interspersed with regular ammunition at a 1:3 or 1:5 ratio. They can cause fires when deployed carefully in that role. 105 The Sub-machinegun Any weapon that fires pistol ammunition such that depressing the trigger causes the weapon to fire continuously until released is a submachine-gun (SMG). These weapons are designed to fire a large amount of cheap, low-recoil ammunition at once, overwhelming targets with firepower to allow other units to maneuver and flank the target. In the hands of an expert, the submachine-gun delivers multiple hits on a target, compensating for any deficiencies in the lighter ammunition, whether real or imagined. There are two basic types of SMG: the open bolt and the closed bolt design. Each have advantages and disadvantages. The open bolt design is seen in cheap and durable weapons like the World War II Sten gun and the more modern Israeli Uzi. In these weapons a bolt containing the firing pin is held back, under pressure of a spring, by a latch attached to the trigger. This design is simple and light, but reduces accuracy. An open bolt SMG is prepared for firing by pulling back the bolt using the bolt handle until it latches with the trigger. At this time there is no cartridge in the breech. The closed bolt design is seen in more expensive and complex weapons like the Heckler & Koch MP5. In this design, the bolt is still compressed against the breech by a heavy spring, but it is the firing pin inside the bolt that is latched to the trigger. This mechanism addresses the major drawbacks of the open bolt system at the expense of a more complex design. A closed bolt SMG is prepared for firing by releasing the bolt from the main spring so that it closes and locks with the breech, loaded. At this time there is a cartridge in the breech. 106 First Aid
Occasionally mission parameters will require you to keep someone alive – long enough to testify or squeal or be tortured or (if it’s an agent) to get yelled at for fucking up. The principles are always the same. Activate emergency services, and then, in order: A – establish an Airway. Clear out the vomit and blood. B – determine if the person is Breathing. If not, work on that. Artificial respiration, mouth to mouth. C – check the pulse and determine if the heart is working, if there’s Circulation. If not, work on that too. CPR. You will crack ribs, and it generally doesn’t work, but it is better than nothing. D – if you have ABC, arterial cuts or other Deadly bleeding must be stopped. Direct pressure is probably all you can provide. E – dealing with a sucking chest wound is beyond your ability. But if there’s pink foam on the victim’s chest, a piece of plastic over that can help you deal with Escaping air. If this is your situation, you need emergency medical services, now. There’s no time to wait. If you don’t need the victim, activate EMS by dialing 911 or whatever and get out of there. If you do, then maintain ABCs and get to a safe house where someone who knows about something other than killing can deal with them. 107 108 DIG 23, 46 disarm a bomb 23 dressing down 54 Index drink 53 E effects 46 A enemy 17, 19, 68 era 17, 20 adult diapers 82 escalation 36, 38, 39, 50 agency 17, 20 experience 32 Agent (rank) 48 agents 12 F B failure 37 fan mail 43 beginning of the next session 32 fight 40 BOSS 24, 47 first conflict 38 Bourne 13 first stage effect 46 burn 25 fuck that 42, 56 burn traits 44 G C gadgets 29 catch 49 gimmicks 28 change of objective 54 go to the dice 37 character death 47 character, example 31 H character sheets 31 charge 17, 18, 68 handler 48 chickenshit 52 handouts 12 coda 82 healing 53 colour of dice 52 hit 45 complication 30, 47 HURT 24, 47 CON 23, 46 conflict 35, 40 I COOL 23, 46 ILLUSION 24, 47 image 70 D incentives 82 damage 45, 46 inspirations death 47 100 Bullets 13, 18 declares 40 James Bond 13, 18, 29, 82 dice pool 8, 37 109 K S KILL 23, 46 scene 35, 37 KUNG FU 46 second stage effect 39, 46 SEDUCE 23, 46 L sequence 40 length 37 set 37, 45 losers 55 sets 43 sidekicks 29 M skill 12, 22, 39, 40, 41 skill check 50 magic 24, 47 special ability 22, 48 matching sets 37 success 37, 38, 43, 50, 53 mission 12, 36, 68 supernatural 24 mooks 13 move on 47, 53 T N table 8, 52 TAKE 23, 46 narration 50 team leader 66 NECROMANCY 24, 47 teamwork 40, 42 NPC 36 TEMPT 46 TERROR 23, 46 O tie 44 objective 36, 38, 43, 54, 65 traits 25, 80 operative 48 traits, replenishment of 27, 28, 30 P V pool 39 value 37 principal 36, 39, 53, 70 promotion 53 W wash 48 R WATCH 23, 46 rank 21, 48 winning 53 rejected 42 resolution 35 resolved 53 retaliation 53 rounds 36, 40 running away 52 110