The Blackberry Ten Job, Part 2

Jacob's rendezvous with Vin within the walls of Inish Medical's headquarters yielded chilling truths. Vin's sister Ruth Inish had vast plans for the whole world. And the team found itself headed for Romania, where they needed to find Vin's ex-boyfriend, smuggler lord King Valentin.

Also, Vin got in Jacob's pants. And took a bite.

CAMPAIGN STATS following the 3 November 2013 session
Sessions: 12
Countries visited: 8
Covers blown: 11
Heat: 4
Highest Heat level: 6
Infiltrations: 9
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 8
Shots fired: 14
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 21
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 8
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 24

The Blackberry Ten Job

In which the crew infiltrate a vampire controlled pharmaceutical corp's company town to.... install stuff on their BBs.

CAMPAIGN STATS following the 13 October 2013 session
Sessions: 11
Countries visited: 8
Covers blown: 11
Heat: 4
Highest Heat level: 6
Infiltrations: 9
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 8
Shots fired: 14
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 21
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 6
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 22

I ran RPG demos for college students at UTAR Petaling Jaya yesterday! The Introduction to RPGs workshop lasted two hours and involved five students (10 registered but for some reason only half showed). I ran Night's Black Agents: Excess Baggage by Kevin Kulp and Trail of Cthulhu: Ritual Pursuits by Steve Dempsey. The former lasted just 40 minutes, while the latter took an hour altogether.

All the players were engaged and quite excited about the whole thing. Desperate measures were attempted, such as calling Network contacts when confronted with a ticking suitcase nuke, and reverse-engineering summoning spells during melee combat. New players will try anything, because they don't know better.

Interesting uses of Abilities the new players tried:
- Using Network to call a local gangster to intervene in the car chase in Excess Baggage.
- Using Data Recovery to pull up nuke blueprints to aid in disarming the suitcase nuke.
- Use of Athletics to throw handcuffs around from one teammate to another in the Trail of Cthulhu scenario
- The team doctor tried stabbing just about every opponent with a tranquilizer needle in Trail of Cthulhu - including a Nightgaunt and a mad sorcerer. He even succeeded with the latter.

I moved Excess Baggage from Krakow to Barcelona's Gothic Quarter to help ease language problems - the pregenerated characters could not speak Polish, but a couple could speak Spanish. In Ritual Pursuits, I had the Nightgaunt drop a car on the PCs to get them moving when they spent too long in the farmhouse. Those were the main differences.

I hope the participants will get a chance to explore RPGs further in the future. Most bookstores here don't carry much apart from some old D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder stock. And finding more people to play with can be a challenge, which is why we founded Gamers of KL in the first place...

The Stylish Terrorist Job, Part 2

On this session, the agents sank a freighter full of vampyr hounds while masquerading as PLO commandoes.  And then they infiltrated a medical centre using  Bigfoot as a cover story.

Sessions: 10
Countries visited: 8
Covers blown: 11
Heat: 6
Highest Heat level: 6
Infiltrations: 8
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 8
Shots fired: 13
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 21
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 5
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 20

The Stylish Terrorist Job, Part 1

Acting on intel from the new Russian guy Nikolai from St. Petersburg, Sami, Misha, Nikolai and Zlatan shop for a fast boat, weapons, C4, thermite, lowlight tactical gear and propeller-arresting metal net, so we can intercept and steal a whole cargo vessel en route to Cardiff.

While speaking in bad English.

Aboard are doggies in ultra-secured cages. Vampire doggies.

Sessions: 9
Countries visited: 7
Covers blown: 11
Heat: 6
Highest Heat level: 6
Infiltrations: 7
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 8
Shots fired: 13
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 1
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 5
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 18

Night’s Black Agents has a couple of special Abilities that help players to emulate the tangled networks and cover stories of the spy genre.

Cover represents the carefully-constructed false identities that each agent has built up over the years across the globe. Every player starts with at least 10 points of Cover, so nobody goes into a fresh campaign without this useful feature. Cover identities are not defined ahead of time; instead, you may permanently move any number of Cover points into a cover identity during play to say that you had this identity all along. The more points you put into the cover pool of that identity, the deeper and well-established the cover is. If you have 8 or more in the Disguise ability, you can even create a connected cover identity that is a known associate of an NPC. Also, with every cover identity you define, you can link it to a familiar city so that you get easier rolls when making your way around or trying to source for black market goods in that city.

Network represents the many contacts and allies that your agent has made around the world. Every player starts with a minimum of 15 Network. Similar to Cover, you can spend Network to create new contacts any time during a game. The more points you put into a contact, the more well-connected that person is. You can call upon the contact as an information source, depending on whether or not the Director feels it is an appropriate source of clues, or for various favours, from getting access to the secret Vatican archives to calling in Carabinieri helicopters to evacuate you from a sinking ferry in the Bay of Naples.

The drawback for both cover identities and Network contacts is while you get tremendous flexibility in defining them in play, they get used up permanently whenever they are tested. When your cover is tested by going through a security check, or when your contact pulls strings to do a favour for you, you need to roll against a difficulty that is usually determined by the current level of security or scrutiny that you need to bypass. Players will find that it may not be that easy to simply burn through their cover identities and contacts when it costs Experience Points just to replenish their points. Plus, I’ve  found that while some players are more than willing to use up a contact and toss them aside, others will invest even more points in a favourite NPC just to keep the Director from killing them off once their usefulness is ended!

Sessions: 8
Countries visited: 7
Covers blown: 11
Heat: 4
Highest Heat level: 5
Infiltrations: 6
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 7
Shots fired: 12
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 1
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 5
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 16

GUMSHOE, created by Robin D. Laws, is a lean mean roleplaying system that streamlines and focuses investigative adventures. It makes the players and the Director all feel a lot smarter. There is no need for the Director to fudge rolls or rules, and no time is wasted on dead ends, failed investigation rolls and players getting stuck.

In a Night’s Black Agents game, there are two kinds of Abilities measuring an Agent’s skills and talents:

1. General Abilities. These are used to Do Important Stuff, like blasting vampires with assault rifles, driving cars through fences and tailing minions through crowded train stations. You roll dice and see if you succeed or fail at a General Ability.
   
2. Investigative Abilities. These are used to Find Out What There Is To Do. These Abilities cover tapping a corrupt Russian general’s phone, searching university archives for books on vampire lore, and seducing the general’s chauffeur. You never roll dice for Investigative Abilities.
   

The real power of GUMSHOE comes from Investigative Abilities, which every Agent has in abundance. These Abilities are used to get clues and find out where the bad guys are, what they are doing, and ways to stop them.

As long as you get yourself into a scene where relevant information can be gathered, have one of the right Abilities to get that information, and tell the Director you are using that Ability, you always succeed in getting a clue. At the very least, a core clue that leads to another important scene/character/location where there are more clues or Important Stuff To Do.

Also, you can expend Investigative Ability points to get additional information, such as weaknesses of the enemy, or to get temporary bonuses in a tactical situation. That's where the rest of the detailed rules come in.

But you never need to spend any points to get core clues. You only need to have a score of 1 or more in that Ability rating.

It's the same rule system that powers games like Trail of Cthulhu. It helps the Director to ensure that players Find Out What There Is To Do in a simple and fun way, and then Do Important Stuff, like shooting magnesium flares through the window of Dracula's limousine.

And that's why you should play Night's Black Agents.

- the Director

Sessions: 7
Countries visited: 7
Covers blown: 9
Heat: 5
Highest Heat level: 5
Infiltrations: 6
Foot chases: 3
Car chases: 1
Fights: 6
Shots fired: 11
Human Vampires destroyed: 4
Canine Vampires destroyed: 1
Conspyramid Nodes discovered: 4
Conspyramid Nodes destroyed: 0
XP awarded: 14

HBO put up a sigil creator, so I hacked something up for our borzoi.

- the Director