So last time I told you about how it came to be that I was going to do some solo rp and how I decided on Spycraft. And this time we are going to get our hands dirty with a little world building.
As mentioned last post, I have had spycraft for a long, long time. I have never played it properly, actually. I also have the pdf for the 1960s era which I got as a gift once upon a time from a friend. And I have very fond memories of Millennium’s End and all the fun an actual action game can be. So that is going to be our game system for this. Spycraft classic as I have discovered it is now called, and the 1960s era book.
Now the next step for any solo rp player is to decide if they are going to have a team or just one character. Certain game systems tend to lean one way or other on this issue, but I feel the nature of the action/spy genre lends itself well to a solo operative with NPCs filling other roles as needed. Especially in a 1960s era of classic spy craft thrillers.
But before we can truly make a spy, we of course need a world for him or her to spy in. For this I leaned to my first solo tool to be used in this game; the Mythic GM emulator (or specifically a single page from the variant 1 book)
I am using the 1e mythic gme and its variant 1 book only because that is what I have. I got them cheap and am too much of a tight arse to update to the 2e book haha. In particular I am looking at one table of the variant book, the action/subject table.
We want 2 spy agencies to choose from I think. Mi5 and spectre, austin powers and dr evil, the a team and the American government, Perry the Platypus and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Its usually the way. So for that I rolled on the table once for each spy team.
The first team got: 30 break and 88 illusions
The second team got: 47 travel and 7 allies
I thought about these two teams and tried to consider how that would relate to espionage. I started with the Travel Allies, thinking about what alliances meant on a political stage and why travel would be important. Something that I wanted to avoid in this game was the concept of nations and I knew I didn’t want my hero to be tied to one nation in particular like James Bond or whatever. A big part of this is simply just that I do not know enough about the world’s politics and militaries to be able to get in deep with that sort of thing. Not now in the present and certainly not back in the swinging 60s. I didn’t want my game to get bogged down with history homework any time I tried to play it. So I decided that the agency represented by Travel Allies was going to be one that operated outside of a government jurisdiction. I thought, surely in a time such as the Cold War there are political entanglements with trying to get espionage done. What if there were mercenaries to whom such messy jobs could go to. What if there were Allies who are able to travel where your government agents can not without risking a full blown crisis. This could be the organisation represented by this faction.
Next, break illusions. With an established faction in mind for the travel allies, it stands to reason that the enemy should be motivated to want the opposite of what that faction wants. But what illusions are there being protected by the travel allies? I thought about this for some time before realising what the break illusions faction wants. They want the truth to be out there. No illusions. If they show the espionage, the real people behind false flag attacks, the weapons dealers backing both sides of the wars, the innocent bystanders being hurt by these players of “the great game” then they can dismantle the systems of power held in place by these governments. Whilst initially this seems like quite a noble goal, it is important to understand that sometimes this layer of secrecy is beneficial to the everyday layman on the street. Whilst ideologically, yes in a perfect world we do want to know the truth, pragmatically no this has consequences. If the secrecy and espionage is removed from the cold war then we get a hot war… nukes and bombs and all out violence. In the 60s we have that, we have just had decade after decade of that. Our world can’t handle that kind of indiscriminate and ubiquitous violence.
So I have my two factions, The Travel Allies and The Break Illusions. And I think that traditionally the “good guys” defend the status quo, so our hero will be a travel ally. They needed names. I spent some time thinking about what words the world put in my path and by the end of the day I had two. “ORCHID” and “VIPER” popped up several times throughout the day in unusual ways and so I appropriated them for my game. I am pretty sure that Viper as an acronym is something that for sure would have been used so I decided to do the old battletech trick of throwing a colour or adjective in front of it. After some sniffing around I came across a colour I had never heard of “Sinoper” which apparently was common in the Renaissance so is a perfect addition to a faction trying to bring about a new era of enlightenment to the world. Sinoper is also named after a place in Turkey so fits nicely with the exotic theme of a spy novel.
With our two factions in play, now all that is left is to make a character and play out some scenes. See you in the next episode.
Ciao for now,
-Arjade
